On August 25, 2026, BioPharma Dive published an analysis of Silicon Valley Bank's latest women's health data showing that total venture funding into women's health companies — therapeutics, devices and health technologies alike — fell from $3.2 billion in 2024 to roughly $2 billion in 2025. SVB's Jackie Scheffel frames the drop not as a retreat but as a "reset" recalibrating "where and how capital moves through the market," and the bar has moved sharply: "Progress that used to be the province of Series A is now required to raise a Seed round."

Why It Matters

This is the macro backdrop for every femtech and sexual wellness funding headline Afterglow covers. A 37% year-over-year decline in category venture funding, paired with a rising evidentiary bar at Seed, explains why 2026's rounds skew toward clinically-validated diagnostics, hormone monitoring and reimbursement-ready devices rather than DTC hardware — and why Elvie's collapse into administration was a genre, not an outlier. The "widening the TAM" repositioning is the most actionable takeaway: founders in sexual health are increasingly advised to frame their company as cardiometabolic, mental health or longevity rather than "women's health," which is good fundraising advice and terrible for category visibility. Meanwhile the exit window — 18 acquisitions, 14 IPOs — is the counter-signal suggesting the money hasn't left, it has simply moved later in the lifecycle.

The most consequential finding for anyone building in sexual and reproductive health is a positioning shift. When SVB started tracking the category, deals clustered around reproductive healthcare — contraception, maternal health, fertility. Now founders are deliberately widening the addressable market they pitch, targeting conditions like depression, obesity and heart disease that affect both sexes but present differently, disproportionately or uniquely in women. "People don't come out and say I'm serving women, because they're not only serving women," Scheffel said. "It's like a marketing issue more than it is anything else."

The exit data complicates the gloom. SVB counted 18 women's health acquisitions in 2025, only a modest dip from 21 the year prior, and 14 women's health startups went public in 2025 after zero did in 2024. More billion-dollar names are emerging — Flo Health, Midi Health and Maven among them. One of 2026's largest biopharma buyouts involved women's health company Organon.

The bear case is commercial, not scientific. H.C. Wainwright's Douglas Tsao told BioPharma Dive that women's health "has been out of favor with traditional biotech investors" partly because recent women-targeted drug launches have underperformed. Astellas' non-hormonal menopause therapy Veozah — the drug NICE and the Scottish Medicines Consortium have been steadily clearing for NHS use, as Afterglow has tracked — reached roughly $300 million in sales last year and about $100 million in Q1 FY2026, hampered by soft demand and reimbursement friction. Bayer has not yet broken out sales for competing drug Lynkuet, approved last year. Tsao notes that much of the current activity concentrates in "low barrier to entry" segments like diagnostics and testing services that reach market faster and cheaper than a novel medicine.

Scheffel's forward-looking argument is about data assets: women's health companies are accumulating large longitudinal datasets on pregnancy and menopause that could feed AI-driven discovery for underserved conditions — though SVB's report also cites Pew polling showing women are less likely than men to believe AI will improve their healthcare.

Sources

Update — 2026-08-30

{Initial entry — story first created.}