The flagship women’s health summit brought together over 400 visionary founders, funders and innovators, with a shared mission of transforming women’s health worldwide.

This year’s Women’s Health Week, which took place at the Barbican, London from 14-17 October, showcased a sector once considered by funders to be too much of a ‘niche’, meeting a crucial unmet need with huge market demand.

Investments are outperforming their value, regulators want to speed up the route to market, and clinical validation is cutting through the noise and demonstrating real results.

There is a buzz about the femtech sector – or at least there was in the Barbican last week – but experts have urged founders should move forward responsibility, building ethics and equity into their innovations.

Here’s our takeaways from the key conversations at Women’s Health Week.

1. Women’s health is outperforming – but angels and influencers are crucial for raising capital

Investment in women’s health is outperforming, and this trend is expected to continue, according to the panel at Women’s Health Week on Thursday 16th, where fund managers and founders highlighted significant returns, growing institutional interest, and the critical role of early-stage backers.

Sanji Chotai, a senior investment manager at British Business Bank, says she is seeing “really encouraging data” and anticipates more “outperformance”, particularly in medtech, which is drawing interest thanks to “shorter timelines to regulatory approval” and rapid commercialisation.

Series A and B activity is also picking up, but the panel agreed that early-stage capital and angel investors remain essential.

“My first angel investment in a women’s health company, I think on Series A, is going to be 20x on multiple and for our fund, it’s going to be around 9x,” said Trin Linamagi, founding partner at Sie Ventures.

“We need to take bigger bets and double down – and actually put the capital behind these businesses early on.”

Having driven successful campaigns for Soulcycle and Barry’s Bootcamp, Tatum Getty, now a founding general partner at THENA, also highlighted the importance of influencers – and not just on Instagram.

“Who is that person who believes in what we’re building and will tell their friends,” she said.

“Women have not been traditional investors they are more risk averse, smaller investment but bigger impact. They add so much more value than the amount of capital that they contribute.”

2. NICE and new pathways for health technologies

During a discussion on mastering Europe’s regulatory process, a representative from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) outlined how new rules-based approval routes, now being introduced for health technologies, are designed to speed access to innovation.

The body is also better aligning processes with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to reduce the time it takes to regulatory approval.

“We’re taking forward the rules-based pathway for health tech,” said Kendall Gilmore, a senior advisor at NICE.

“Developing a model more similar to the medicines pathway, where, for some products, it goes through the MHRA, through NICE and then comes with a recommendation that has a funding mandate attached.”

The pathway, currently being developed will see health technologies assessed in a similar way to medicines with the first products approved from April next year.

NICE currently evaluates only a fraction of the 500,000 technologies used daily in the NHS. While a NICE recommendation is “not mandatory”, it can be a “powerful signal” to the NHS.

NICE is constantly “horizon scanning” for “disruptive products” further down the pipeline and is engaging more directly with innovators, industry associations and international partners to identify promising technologies earlier, and a new early value assessment route is giving promising products a faster track.

“If it meets an unmet need, it should be used with further evidence generation,” Gilmore explained.

“This is particularly relevant for digital health and diagnostics.”

3. Scientific validation is the most effective way to ‘cut through the noise’ 

In a panel exploring how to “cut through the noise” in femtech, founders were urged to bake credibility into product design from day one, with scientific proof and clinical validation the sharpest differentiator, according to Soun Rakshit, of MV Health.

“You have to spend probably two years going through the R&D process,” said Rakshit.

“That is the best and probably the only way to do it, so that by the time you get regulatory approval, you have already had significant patient feedback and iteration.”

Earning trust also means collaborating with experts who understand the problem, as Helen O’Neil, founder of Hertility, explained.

When in the development stage, O’Neil reached out to professionals, including obstetricians and gynaecologists to understand the right questions to ask based on their “clinical intuition and personal experience”.

Rakshit added: “If we can show true clinical evidence, and it does take time, it is the best way to cut through the noise.”

4. Bias in AI is ‘real and harmful’ – and founders need to know how to address it

Experts discussed the role of AI and its potential to both help and harm women’s health, urging proactive testing and human oversight to avoid the risk of decades of a “male default model” being implemented into new solutions.

“AI that’s trained on that skewed data can really fail women,” said Sarah Montgomery Taylor, clinical lead of GenAI evaluation and scaled services at Google, highlighting familiar examples such as heart-attack presentation.

“Biases are real, and they are really harmful, and so being aware of them is so crucial.”

Panellists also flagged “measurement bias” and the “historical dismissal of women’s pain,” where systems trained on those records “can learn to deprioritise” certain signals.

Beyond bias in diagnostics, Marinos Ionnides, head of software and AI medical devices regulation at the MHRA, highlighted the risks of implementing AI in areas where there may be hidden bias.

“I’m quite worried about the deployment of software AI in places where we aren’t we didn’t know we would be finding bias [such as] appointment booking,” he said, adding that in these “unknown unknowns,” “the regulator has their greatest role”.

Founders were urged to be responsible when scaling AI, introducing guardrails such as building in equity and collecting data from the very beginning for “rigorous real-world validation”.

Clinicians need to be able to test the product and understand it to build trust, while regulatory processes should be “adaptive”, offering “clarity on what the path is to market”.

Chen Davies, founder at Anya, shared a real-world example of how products and content tailored for underserved groups drove measurable change, including a “10% population-wise” rise in breastfeeding rates in a deprived area of Blackpool after six months.

“AI should gradually complement human support without replacing it,” said Davies.

5. Consumer data can play a critical role in building the clinical evidence-base 

During the final panel, participants argued that continuous real-world data, paired with clinical benchmarks, is the fastest way to fix women’s health’s “male baseline” problem and turn lived experience into evidence.

Dr Chris Curry, clinical director for women’s health at Oura, argued that wearables are “one of the big unlocks” by collecting data that gives the “whole picture of the human”.

But tracking can – should – meet clinical standards, with the panel pushing for globally representative consumer datasets.

“I see consumer data if it’s truly representative, if it’s truly globally representative, being critical,” said Micah Gellman, a senior strategist for women’s health innovation at the Gates Foundation.

“It helps us calibrate and link consumer insights and lived experience to clinical anchors and value outcomes… this kind of consumer data is one avenue that we have to really change investor appetite.”

Rhiannon White, CEO of Clue, which has a long-running research collaboration with Oura, including collecting symptom tracking data on perimenopause and pain, added that women’s spending power can actually steer where future R&D should be focused.

“We are able to shape and direct where people will put their research and put their development with our spending power,” she said.

6. The crisis in government support can be an opportunity for more innovative funding pathways 

With the Gates Foundation recently committing an additional US$2.5bn for research in women’s health, Gellman also reframed the reduction in government funding for women’s health – such as that seen under the Trump administration in the US – as an opportunity for more innovate financing.

“There is a real opportunity for European and Asian government funding to step up and fill some of those gaps,” said Gellman.

“An opportunity for government funding and philanthropic funding to take new forms and to be partnering in new ways to catalyse innovation and to work with academics and industry players.”

Rather than a binary between grants and VC, the panel highlighted “blended financing mechanisms, venture philanthropy… different kinds of outcome-based financing” with public and philanthropic dollars used “to de risk, early-stage investment”.

Gellman added: “This crisis that we’re in, in terms of government funding is also an opportunity for innovative financing.”

The comments brought the conference full circle, reminiscent of those made earlier in the day, by Tatum Getty, who highlighted: “Women and small amounts of capital, can make a big difference.”