Canada's First Femtech VC Targets $1 Trillion Women's Health Gap

Women helm 85 percent of the world's femtech startups, yet their male counterparts still pull in the bulk of investment dollars — an imbalance that took centre stage on Monday at Femtech Connect, the inaugural summit of Edmonton-based Antigoni Studios, which bills itself as Canada's first femtech-exclusive venture firm.

The national summit drew founders, investors and researchers to dig into the funding equation for a sector FemHealth Insights now puts at more than 1,700 operating startups globally, up from 1,400 a few years ago. The agenda paired a founder showcase and a sit-down with the Alberta Women's Health Foundation with a keynote from Brittany Barreto, a US-based geneticist, author and femtech founder who also runs the FemHealth Insights consultancy.

How big is the funding gap?

Research from FemHealth Insights underscores the paradox at the heart of the category: women-led femtech startups often close more deals than male-led peers yet raise less capital. That sits on top of a stark underfunding of women's health research itself. Barreto told attendees that less than one percent of US pharmaceutical R&D dollars go toward women's health discoveries. In Canada, a Canadian Institutes of Health Research report shows that as recently as 2010, fewer than 25 percent of health researchers accounted for sex in their studies, and gender was almost entirely ignored.

The downstream cost is concrete: women more often experience adverse drug side effects and late or missed diagnoses. Investors should treat that as a financial risk, Barreto argued. "If you're an investor, a stockholder investing in pharmaceutical companies that aren't looking at female-specific data, that is a risk to your business," she said during her keynote.

McKinsey has put the counterfactual opportunity at $1 trillion in incremental global GDP by 2040 if those health gaps close.

What do VCs actually want from femtech founders?

Courtney Dragani, chief growth officer at The51, a VC firm that backs women-led companies, rejected the idea that femtech requires a special playbook. "What we look for in femtech isn't different from any other company in that we want some demonstration that the problem is sizable enough, and that people are willing to pay for it," Dragani said.

She framed the undercapitalization bluntly. "We know there's a significant white space where women are driving really compelling innovation, and it has been undercapitalized," Dragani said. "It has the capability to outperform and we're trying to find what those pockets are to put our capital into."

Can more female capital change the equation?

The closing investor panel did not dispute that VC dollars favour male founders. The proposed fix centred less on pitch tactics and more on who sits in the decision-making seat. Dragani pointed to research showing that less than 15 percent of VC general partners in Canada are women.

"We need to see more change in terms of who has the authority to make investment decisions," Dragani said. "It's mostly men making the investment decisions, but once you shift those numbers to 30, 40 percent of women in those decision-making rooms, then we see notable differences in terms of where capital flows."

Kristina Milke, a general partner at Western Canadian B2B investor Sprout Fund, argued that private wealth from women is the lever that has barely moved. "Women putting their money into this asset class would be super helpful," Milke said. "There are a lot of women who manage their household's money and are unclear on where to put it. There's some education opportunities that could really help educate women with capital to think about where they would like to put their money."

Dragani drew a parallel to philanthropy. "Women are so often asked about where they want to donate, but they are rarely asked about where they want to invest," she said. "Those don't need to be two separate lenses. You can drive change forward that's very meaningful by putting your capital at risk rather than just giving it away."

With $1 trillion in projected GDP upside and a startup base that has grown by roughly 300 companies in a few years, the test for Antigoni and its peers is whether the LP base, the GP ranks and the cheque sizes move as quickly as the founders.