Key Takeaways:
Women live longer than men, yet they spend 25% more time in poor health—and despite this, women’s health research and development remains chronically underfunded across public health systems, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US to the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK.
In fact, less than 9% of all NIH research grant spending went to women’s health research between 2013 and 2023. In the UK, the gap is even wider in key areas: approximately 2% of national research funding goes toward pregnancy, childbirth, and reproductive health, despite one in three women facing health issues related to reproductive health.
Laura Minquini, founder of AthenaDAO, the decentralized community of researchers, funders, and advocates working to advance women’s health R&D, told BeautyMatter that “there is absolutely nothing more neglected than women’s health.” To address the neglect, Minquini’s new $5 million equity vehicle, AthenaBIO, aims to overcome the numerous breakthroughs stuck in what she calls the “valley of death.”
AthenaBIO’s approach is part of a larger, necessary shift toward locally empowered, equitable research. For beauty and wellness brands, women’s health innovation isn’t niche—it’s the next growth engine for trust, longevity, and differentiation.
The Current Crisis
Women’s health R&D has long suffered from chronic underfunding and structural bias, leaving a staggering economic cost. According to the McKinsey Health Institute and the World Economic Forum’s 2024 report, femtech companies in the digital healthcare space receive only 3% of total digital health funding. But closing the gap could add at least $1 trillion to global GDP annually by 2040.
In the UK, the gender health gap costs the UK economy approximately $51 billion a year—menopause alone is estimated to cost the UK economy $2.47 billion per year in lost productivity, while 23% of women in the UK have even considered resigning because of menopause’s impact.
Despite women bearing the brunt of conditions like PCOS, PMDD, or perimenopause-related illness, the funding gap has left potentially life-changing science stuck in limbo.
As Dame Lesley Regan noted this year, speaking at the Women’s Health Week Europe conference in October 2025, much of women’s healthcare still operates as if it’s 1995, not 2025—a system constrained by gatekeeping and underinvestment.
“Even once we have research, it takes an average of 17 years for those discoveries to make it to a patient’s bedside,” Priyanka Jain, co-founder and CEO at Evvy, the company behind the first at-home vaginal microbiome test, explained to BeautyMatter. Evvy sees the power of taking a consumer-centric approach to solving these problems: “We’ve been able to serve over 75,000 patients, and through their consent and willingness to push the research forward, we have now built the world’s largest longitudinal dataset on the vaginal microbiome,” she said.
“AI-driven healthcare and precision medicine require data—and the system is deeply lacking in female-specific datasets (and biomarkers) to power the personalized interventions that women deserve,” Jain continued.
What both AthenaDAO and Evvy demonstrate is a path forward using decentralized funding and transparency, as well as community-driven datasets, to bypass legacy bottlenecks.
New Funding Architectures
Launched in 2022, AthenaDAO is part of the emerging Decentralized Science (DeSci) movement, aiming to democratize women’s health R&D by pooling community capital, collectively governing IP decisions, and fast-tracking translational projects.
Since then, the organization’s Web3 community has deployed roughly $1.5 million, fueling six labs, two start-ups, 10 fellowships, and a global network of more than 100 live events. Projects include ovarian aging, reproductive longevity, and early-stage diagnostics neglected by traditional VC.
Minquini explains that in the last decade, scientific founders would approach femtech investors (who are not set up to invest for long-term R&D returns) before being told to contact biotech investors, who would then say they do not deal with women’s health. “We are fully set up to do due diligence, and have a more varied timeline of returns with a holding company and SPVs than you would with a fund,” she said.
“What we’re seeing now, through decentralized science and platforms like AthenaDAO, is women becoming active participants in shaping the very questions being studied,” Rebekah Brown, founder and head of research at MPowder, told BeautyMatter. The move from ‘patients as subjects’ to ‘patients as stakeholders’ marks one of the most important cultural shifts in women’s health, she explained. For decades, research was something done to women: data collected, analyzed, and published at a distance. It no longer needs to be this way.
MPowder built a network of 40,000+ women around menopause research and supplementation, and its community are its collaborators, using lived experience to guide what they study and how they design.
But decentralization and strength in numbers isn’t always enough.
DAO Funds Discovery, BIO Funds Scale
Recognizing that community funding alone can’t carry a product through clinical trials, AthenaDAO launched AthenaBIO in September 2025 to bridge translational assets into commercialization, signaling fresh opportunities for beauty and wellness brands to back evidence-based innovation.
While AthenaDAO catalyzes and governs research, AthenaBIO deploys institutional capital to advance assets through the most capital-intensive phases, such as validation, regulation, and scale; currently backing around 15 early-stage assets across AI-driven diagnostics, ovarian health, and reproductive technology.
According to Minquini, women need to know that beauty and medicine are very different verticals. Wellness has become a strong category for consumers, but it is far from providing actual FDA-approved drugs: “For us to resolve conditions like endometriosis, autoimmune disorders, and so many other conditions, we need to push outside the boundaries of digital health or wellness. We need drug discovery, research, and development.”
This next phase, she explained, falls outside of the typical scope of femtech and enters the territory of drug discovery, techbio, or biotech pipelines. “We want to give options to investors who are disillusioned with the current investing landscape in women’s health, and don't feel we ever need to lose our DNA if we drive more capital into scientific companies,” Minquini said.
The distinction is crucial. AthenaBIO isn’t replacing venture capital, it’s re-architecting the funnel. Early research is funded and governed in a decentralized way, but when assets are ready to scale, AthenaBIO takes over. By combining DAO governance with biotech rigor, the organization ensures that promising discoveries don’t stall in the valley, but instead have a clear path to market.
“Wouldn’t it be great if all of this were powered by capital from the beauty and wellness industry?” Minquini added.
The Commercial Reality
Beauty and wellness brands don’t have to sit on the sidelines of women’s health innovation. Examples already exist of brands licensing clinical diagnostics, embedding community-data collaborations, or partnering with female-focused tech platforms to build credibility and scale.
For instance, in early 2025, pharmaceutical company Daré Bioscience partnered with digital women’s health platform Rosy Wellness to introduce a topical sildenafil cream for female arousal disorder, combining clinical innovation with Rosy’s 100,000-strong digital community. Meanwhile, Halle Berry’s midlife-wellness brand, Respin, partnered with intimate-health company Joylux to co-create a gel and device specifically developed for menopausal-related symptoms such as dryness, low libido, hot flashes, and more.
What these brands understand is that the business case for solving women’s health issues is immense. The endometriosis treatment market alone was valued at $1.77 billion in 2025, expected to hit $3.05 billion by 2030.
Companies that successfully move diagnostics or therapies through the valley of death will not only win market share, they’ll also reduce lifetime healthcare costs for millions of women.
For beauty and wellness brands, this could signal the future of consumer trust. By supporting or licensing science emerging from vehicles like AthenaBIO, they can position themselves as leaders in health-driven beauty. “Trust is built when power is shared and processes are transparent,” Brown said. “Decentralized models like AthenaDAO can help by letting women shape the questions, understand the methods, and see where their data goes.”
Endometriosis, PCOS, and menopause-related conditions already account for billions in lost productivity and healthcare costs each year. Whoever finds a way to consistently bridge promising research into real-world products won’t just capture market share—they’ll redefine what women expect from both medicine and beauty.
But the next wave of growth will come from evidence, not aesthetics. “Science-backed beauty” won’t be a marketing claim; it will be the category itself.
The Road Ahead
The Lancet’s November 2025 issue states that strategic autonomy in women’s health research is a necessity, not a luxury. It specifically calls for funding of women-led research consortia and community-driven governance bodies, validating the AthenaBIO model as an example of the kind of women-led, community-governed initiative that global experts consider necessary.
If AthenaBIO succeeds, they could set a blueprint for other neglected areas of health and well-being. Both the DAO organization and equity vehicle demonstrate opportunities in democratized funding and new capital architectures that combine community with institutional scale, as well as highlighting the endless potential for cross-sector partnerships between biotech, beauty, and wellness.
“No single company can solve this alone. It’s going to take collaboration between biotech, digital health, regulators, and payors to make preventive women’s health both scalable and sustainable,” Jain said.
Beauty and wellness brands know how to speak to women and their needs, Minquini stated. “If we could merge this know-how with the importance of research into women’s health, we could be looking at very different outcomes,” she added.