This is what the US$72m women’s health fund would mean for the future of femtech

As SteelSky Ventures raises the world’s largest women’s health VC fund, Femtech World asks founding partner Maria Velissaris how this could unlock new growth opportunities.

In a world where Covid has catalysed telemedicine and digital healthcare, investment in technology infrastructure is needed more than ever.

The close of a US$72m fund makes SteelSky the world’s largest venture capital fund focused on women’s healthcare. The fund aims to invest across the whole spectrum of women’s health, including in terms of medical devices, consumer health, digital health, ePharmacy and retail therapeutics.

“We are really excited about it,” says Maria Velissaris, founding partner and advocate for female founders and women’s health. “We’ve invested in 13 companies, and we plan to invest in about 25 companies out of this first fund.

“We have a lot of investors aligned to make our companies successful – from payers and pharmaceutical companies to strategic investors and hospital systems – and this is one of the reasons why they choose to work with us.”

Covid has dramatically accelerated the transition to digital healthcare and determined, implicitly, a rise in medical advances.

Velissaris says: “The future came very fast and what we thought was going to take the next five to seven years happened overnight. Telemedicine had been around for a long time, but we started to use remote monitoring tools during the pandemic because that was the only way to receive healthcare at the time.

“That gave us a lot of momentum and a lot of opportunity for more digital health tools to pop up more engagement with telemedicine. It also gave people the ability  to be open to using digital health tools in ways that they weren’t prior to the pandemic.”

With more financial independence and an increasing number of women graduating from stem programmes in science, technology, engineering and maths, she believes that we will continue to see innovation through development of new ways to deliver care, new products and services.

“This is going to create a complete paradigm shift of what we will start to see in the market and what gets funded,” the founding partner adds.

A lack of investment alongside a general sense of scepticism were still dominating the femtech sector when Velissaris started investing in 2017.

“People didn’t even believe us how dismal the investment was, because they weren’t even tracking it,” she says. “That’s how little it was.

“Now that we’re tracking it, we can see disparities in investment and in health outcomes and we can see a racial disparity there. Data allows us to bring those [issues] to the light and come up with solutions to fix them.”

Research is another important factor in creating actionable insights and shaping a better understanding of the market and where money is needed.

“I do believe that there’s a lot of weight on our shoulders,” Velissaris points out.

“Because we’re growing this new category, we have to come up with the data, we have to fund the company and we have to change healthcare policies. There’s just so much that we still need to do and it’s a lot bigger than just writing a check.”

Although support from celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow has raised visibility for this sector, recent reports have shown that femtech funding lags behind. From a digital health investment of over US$14bn dollars in 2020, femtech made up only US$254m of this.

“Even though  we’re talking about it more broadly, the sector is still overlooked.

“We need investment that can grow because if women’s health companies become successful, then more people will start investing in women’s healthcare. This cycle will essentially drive itself and will attract more investment, get more exits and create a multibillion-dollar segment like the other ones [in the health industry].”

The US$72m fund is just the start of what SteelSky aims to change. Velissaris says that the next step would be a US$100m fund towards the end of the year.

“There’s no shortage of great women’s health companies in the pipeline. We constantly see so many great companies and we want to have the money to continue to fund them.

“We’re also really interested in looking at what healthcare looks like for women over 40 because there are a lot of things that come along with being a woman and at that point, you’re basically pushed out of the healthcare system. But there are still so many needs that women have and we really think there’s a lot of opportunity in solutions for women of that age.”

Find out more about SteelSky Ventures here.