On August 11, 2026, women's-health startups Papcup and Peripear each secured £75,000 in non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK's Women in Innovation program, a boost that lets two very different femtech ideas advance without giving up equity. The awards were reported by Femtech Insider and tracked by the venture database Dealroom, and they land as part of this year's cohort of 100 female founders — the program's largest to date — spanning manufacturing, digital tech, and life sciences.

Why It Matters

Non-dilutive grants are quietly one of the most important tools in femtech, a sector that remains structurally underfunded relative to the size of the market it serves. For early hardware and diagnostics companies, £75,000 and a year of mentorship can fund exactly the validation work — biosensor accuracy for Papcup, a first-in-human study for Peripear — that de-risks the next equity round. The two awards also illustrate femtech's breadth: one product reframes menstrual blood as a diagnostic asset, the other targets a near-universal childbirth injury that clinical medicine has long undertreated. Government-backed programs like Women in Innovation help offset venture capital's historic reluctance to fund women's health, and their portfolio is an early signal of which categories investors will chase next.

Papcup, founded by Sânziana Foia, is developing an at-home diagnostic that uses electrochemical biosensing to analyze menstrual blood. Early data suggests the noninvasive approach could help detect conditions such as iron deficiency and even signals relevant to cervical cancer — positioning it as a potential complement or alternative to traditional screenings like the pap smear. If it works at scale, it turns a monthly biological event most diagnostics ignore into a recurring, low-friction health checkpoint.

Peripear, founded by midwife Nina van Schaick, takes on a problem that affects roughly 90% of vaginal births: perineal tearing. Its automated perineal thermotherapy wearable delivers hands-free warmth during childbirth, a technique clinicians already use manually to reduce tearing, now packaged as a device. The grant will support Peripear's first-in-human study at the National University Hospital System in Singapore next year.

Launched in 2016, Innovate UK's annual Women in Innovation program pairs capital with a year of training, business support, and mentoring for female entrepreneurs — a deliberate counterweight to the persistent funding gap in women's health. Both companies now join a growing UK femtech pipeline that, per separate Mills & Reeve research this month, has seen investment climb 194% over the past decade.

Sources

Update — 2026-08-17

{Initial entry — story first created.}