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Funding into the UK femtech start-up ecosystem dropped by 59%, says report

By Published On: March 9, 2023
Funding into the UK femtech start-up ecosystem dropped by 59%, says report

Total funding into the femtech UK start-up ecosystem has dropped by 59 per cent from US$132m in 2021 to US$54m in 2022, a new report has shown.

According to the FemTech UK Report 2022, conducted by the market research company Tracxn, the decrease in funding was primarily caused by the lack of funding for late-stage investments.

Seed-stage funding rose 33 per cent from US$6.74m in 2021 to US$8.96m in 2022 and early-stage investments grew 142 per cent from US$18.6m in 2021 to US$45m in 2022.

The share of funding into the femtech space, as a percentage of overall funding into digital heath, fell from five per cent in 2021 to four per cent in 2022, the report has also revealed.

“Femtech is a budding segment in the digital health sector which has started to gain investor interest from the last few years. Still the sector is in a nascent stage and funding activity in the sector is a small fraction of funding in the over all digital health space,” the report has stated.

“Although the sector is receiving a small portion of the overall funding for digital health, performance is considerably better than that of the pre-pandemic period and we expect it to keep doing well in the coming years.”

The findings have shown that the UK remains the market leader for the femtech sector in Europe, ranking third behind the US and China on a global level when it comes to funding.

Multiple VCs and accelerators have been founded in the UK to support femtech start-ups in the region and the government has created a roadmap to improve the health and wellbeing of girls and women by introducing the Health and Wellbeing Fund 2022 to 2025.

Acquisitions of Alva, a content platform for menopause by Vira Health, and Parla, an app for female fertility management acquired by Holland & Barrett are the only ones witnessed in 2022, compared with 2021 which had no acquisition.

Tracxn has found that cities that have raised the maximum funding in the UK femtech sector were London, Cambridge, and Warwick.

However, data has shown that London-based start-ups raised 15 times more funding than Cambridge and Warwick put together, reaffirming that the capital remains the leading destination to grow a technology business outside of Silicon Valley.

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