The Hidden Reason Promising Women’s Health Startups Fail
What one case taught me about market readiness, investor blind spots, and when mission isn’t enough.
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I still remember where I was sitting when I read the email. It was at a corner booth at a café in Zürich, laptop half-closed, that familiar weight in my chest that comes when something you believed in starts to unravel.
This women’s health startup had everything. They had a mission so clear it felt inevitable. They had founders who didn’t just understand the problem but had lived it. They had a solution that made you wonder why no one had built it before. They had early traction that suggested there was a real demand.
And then, two and a half years after their seed round, it was over. The startup was shutting down.
That moment at the café wasn’t the end of the story. It was the beginning of a reckoning.
The Pitch That Haunted Me
When I first came across their pitch, I felt that electric moment every investor chases when someone names a problem so precisely, so unflinchingly, that you can’t believe you hadn’t seen it before.
They were solving the postpartum care gap.
You know, that six-week void where new mothers are discharged from the hospital and essentially abandoned until their first follow-up. No pelvic floor rehab. No lactation support at 2 AM. No guidance for C-section recovery beyond “take it easy.”
Their solution? Virtual maternal care delivered at home.
Pelvic floor physical therapy. On-demand lactation consulting. Recovery coaching that fit into the chaos of new parenthood.
Evidence-based. Convenient. Continuous.
This was not just a good idea. It was a much needed one. The timing felt perfect. The pandemic had normalized telehealth. Rural maternity wards were closing. Structural inequities in birth outcomes were finally making headlines.
It felt like a peek into what care could look like if the system evolved.
I remember thinking: This is why I do this work.
When Perfect Still Doesn’t Work
But as the months passed, something didn’t add up. The product was strong. The mission was real. But growth was sluggish. Revenue was sporadic. Something fundamental was off.
So I started asking the harder questions. Not about the founders; they were brilliant. Not about the services they were selling; because it worked. I started asking questions about the system they were trying to change.
Because here’s the brutal truth I learned: In healthcare, pain isn’t the same as demand.
These founders weren’t just selling a service. They were trying to build a new channel. And channels don’t move easily.
Reimbursement for virtual postpartum care was inconsistent.
OB-GYNs weren’t incentivized to refer outside their walls.
Cash-pay models, however patient-centric, didn’t work for new mothers already drowning in bills and bureaucracy.
They weren’t pitching a product. They were pitching a workaround for everything that is broken in today’s healthcare system.
And workarounds don’t scale if the system doesn’t move.
The Moment I Almost Walked Away
Reading that shutdown email from the founders of this startup, something shifted. For the first time, I asked myself: Do I even understand this space?
If a company this thoughtful, solving a problem this urgent, couldn’t survive, what was I doing?
Was I just another investor falling for narrative while missing the structural realities that determine survival.
I closed my laptop. Walked to the lake. And for two hours, I questioned everything; my investor lens, my criteria, my conviction.
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What I Learned in the Wreckage
Then I did what every good investor should do when a thesis breaks down: I studied the case. Spoke to other founders. Tracked what separated the ventures that made it from the ones that didn’t.
And I realized this wasn’t a failure of ambition. It was a collision with inertia.
Some of the most promising women’s health startups won’t fail because the idea is wrong. They will fail because they are trying to build a company around systems that have no incentive to evolve.
The question isn’t whether the need is real. It’s whether the infrastructure to support the solution exists. And if it doesn’t, can the company build that too?
Why This Story Matters for You
Every founder who comes next will face that same collision. And every investor will need to decide:
Are you funding a company, or trying to fund a workaround for the system itself?
Sometimes the answer is both. You just need to know which one you are betting on.
That founder didn’t make me quit. She made me sharper. She taught me that in women’s health investing, mission isn’t enough. Market need isn’t enough.
Even exceptional execution isn’t enough.
You need to understand the system. Its incentives. Its inertia. Its invisible rules. You need to see not just what should work, but what can work, within the constraints of how healthcare actually operates.
That kind of insight changes how you evaluate opportunities. It is the difference between falling for a beautiful pitch and backing a strategy that compounds.
This is one of several real-world case studies in my upcoming book, The Billion Dollar Blind Spot. Each one reveals the patterns most investors miss and the frameworks that help you see what others overlook.
If you are exploring how to evaluate women’s health innovation through a systems-aware lens, consider joining the waitlist for the Investor Readiness Program. We open registration in July, and spaces are limited.
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Coming in July 2025:
🎧 Blindspot Capital: The Podcast
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💥 Ida Tin (Clue, FemTech Assembly) on founding the femtech category
🧠 Lisa Suennen (venture partner & healthtech strategist) on how institutional capital moves.We are also in conversation with voices from maternal science to global policy stay tuned as the full season drops.
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I write weekly at FemmeHealth Ventures Alliance about capital, care, and the future of overlooked markets. If you are building, backing, or allocating in this space, I’d love to connect.
Disclaimer & Disclosure
This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or medical advice, or an offer to buy or sell any securities. Opinions expressed are those of the author and may not reflect the views of affiliated organisations. Readers should seek professional advice tailored to their individual circumstances before making investment decisions. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Fascinating insight. I hope someone does solve this care gap - it is a special kind of brutality to leave women to their own devices during that most intense transformation without any care or support, requiring them to take their babies to the doctor without being checked on once themselves. Mothers and babies are one system. Check on the mother. I was lucky to do homebirth and have my midwives come to my house every week and check my health, coach me, make sure my mental wellbeing, relationships, physical health, lactation, and questions were answered as I crossed the threshold into motherhood. I see now why making this shift in care is more of an uphill battle than I previously thought, but imagine what it could do for maternal and child outcomes.
Sitting here nursing my six week old and emphatically nodding my head!