Key takeaways:
Despite record-breaking investment and rising public interest in women’s health, femtech brands focused on intimate wellness—vaginal health, reproductive care, and sexual wellness—continue to face outsized barriers to scaling.
It’s not for lack of consumer demand. One in four women in England has a serious reproductive health issue, and 96% of UK-based 16-to-40-year-olds report period pain (59% call it severe). In the US, women and other marginalized groups are 30% more likely to be medically misdiagnosed than men. This equates to millions of people with vulvas suffering, looking for solutions outside of typical medical institutions. Despite this clear consumer need, tech innovations designed to meet it often struggle to gain traction.
“Women’s health already tends to be deprioritized, and within that, intimate wellness remains taboo,” pharma/biotech consultant and femtech venture fellow, Karolina Fratczak, told BeautyMatter. “That’s not because the market isn’t big; it’s because it’s not understood.”
Marina Gerner, PhD, author of The Vagina Business, told BeautyMatter that women's health has been “underresearched and underfunded for a very long time. And unlike the beauty or general wellness industry, many areas of femtech are shrouded in stigma to this day.”
This outdated shame and stigma continues to have a ripple effect on the industry today. From digital censorship to the gender gap in venture capital, challenges persist, despite funding and innovation reaching an all-time high.
Intimate Innovation
The intimate corners of the women’s well-being industry are poised for growth: sexual wellness was valued at $27.22 billion in 2025 (predicted to reach approximately $52.7 billion by 2034), while the intimate care market reported a valuation of $30.2 billion in 2024 ($44.3 billion by 2034).
Innovation in the space led to the launch of a new wearable wellness device from OhmBody, the women’s health division of Texas-based neurotechnology company Spark Biomedical, which utilizes neurostimulation to target nerve pathways and alleviate menstrual symptoms without the use of drugs or hormones. There is also Dublin-based start-up Joii’s AI-powered pad and app that provides users with clinical-grade insights. And Teal Health’s approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first at-home test for cervical cancer screenings.
In April, Calla Lily Clinical Care, the company working hard to bring its vaginal drug delivery device to market, raised £1 million ($1.3 million) in funding from the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Last November, Evvy, the company known for offering the most comprehensive vaginal microbiome test, announced its expansion into treatments with a new line of prescription-grade products for vaginal symptom relief.
What this technological innovation and financial injection demonstrate is a move in the right direction: Healthtech companies focused on intimate wellness and care are successfully navigating boardroom pitches, but they’re encountering roadblocks on the way to market.
Market Momentum Meets Market Misogyny
Recent shifts in politics and policies, both in the US and the UK, could stymie research and development in women’s health and femtech—and in turn, intimate wellness.
Headlines today still outline the lack of female-only medical trials in the UK. It was in the late 1980s that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) began implementing policies regarding the inclusion of women in scientific studies, which became federal law in 1993. Only in 2025 does it feel like we’re finally starting to understand how biologically different women are from men.
However, the mystery and misinformation surrounding women’s health for centuries continues to reinforce the shame and stigma. This, in part, is why brands in this sector continue to struggle to secure shelf space, mainstream advertising, and equal access to venture capital, especially when compared to other beauty and wellness sectors.
“There are few standout brands that have turned vulval and vaginal care into an aspirational lifestyle category,” founder of femtech-focused futures agency Ultra Violet, Anna Butterworth, told BeautyMatter. “Elvie’s work in destigmatizing pelvic health and breastfeeding made a huge impact across the category and was one of the first brand-led companies in femtech. Momotaro Apotheca, Dame, and Daye all come to mind as brilliant examples of brands steeped in validity as well as aspiration.”
Intimate femtech brands must strike a fine balance between being clinical enough to feel trustworthy and aspirational enough to evoke a lifestyle brand, often drawing on trends and aesthetics to inform their tone, packaging, and language, thereby helping to shape consumer acceptance.
Vaginas vs. VC
While femtech funding is growing, women-led start-ups—especially those addressing taboo topics—receive a disproportionately small share of VC dollars. Stigma and discomfort still shape investment decisions, particularly for products related to menstruation, sexual pleasure, and vaginal health.
In 2024, women’s health received a record $2.6 billion in investment, marking a significant step in the right direction. However, when compared to the total global VC investment in 2024, which was $368 billion, it doesn’t seem quite as impressive.
“One major issue is the lack of representation within investing teams,” Fratczak explained. “When no one in the room has personally experienced the problem, or understands its broader impact, it’s easy to dismiss it as niche or nonurgent. Especially when these products compete against more familiar categories like fintech, which feel universally relevant.”
Fratczak argues that modern women’s health or femtech needs more strategic diversification in product design, business models, and go-to-market strategies if it wants to stand out in the eyes of generalist investors.
The primary difference for a women’s health or femtech brand’s go-to-market, compared with other CPG brands, is time, according to Butterworth.
“What most VCs (and new marketing teams or founders) don’t understand is that women's health and femtech have a much longer education phase than most other categories.” Brands in this space often need to educate consumers before they can offer effective solutions. “VCs are not accounting for that in their investment thesis and get frustrated when the runway is longer,” Butterworth added.
Investment bias also persists because male-dominated committees often lack understanding or comfort with intimate wellness, compounding the challenge. Gerner explains in her book how one investor stated he didn’t want to "talk about vaginas in Monday morning partner meetings"—a revealing, and unfortunately, typical, attitude.
In response, female-focused funds are launching around the world to address systemic problems. From New York’s FemHealth Ventures to Stockholm’s The Case for Her and London’s Goddess Gaia Ventures to Malaysia’s 1337 Ventures, “I do think female-led funds and femtech-specific funds are a step forward; they channel more capital into the industry and they have the specialized knowledge necessary to do so,” Gerner continued.
However, according to both Fratczak and Gerner, scaling will require buy-in from larger funds—as well as international recognition that women’s health isn’t a niche but an undercapitalized growth category.
Only when we start to see widespread awareness and understanding will we see intimate wellness match the success of other femtech categories.
Retail Resistance
The intimate femtech products that do make it through funding rounds and production cycles, all the way to market, still face reluctance from major retailers. From Sephora to Bloomingdale's, more e-commerce giants have added sexual wellness brands to their roster—yet they remain at the back of physical stores, out of sight if they’re even in-store at all.
The persistent stigma around vulva and vaginal health keeps these products at the margins, even though there’s evidence of consumer demand and visible commercial success of less taboo-adjacent femtech brands. When big retailers like Walmart or Target launched femtech into stores, it normalized the category, making sexual (and eventually intimate) wellness more accessible and less stigmatized.
However, the path to retail visibility is still uneven. High-street chains have embraced everything from vibrators to personal lubricants, yet vaginal pH tests remain a harder sell. “The more you normalize the narrative, the less room there is for discomfort or dismissal,” Fratczak said.
According to Vision Research, 55% of sexual wellness sales still occur online, and it’s this channel that’s experiencing the fastest growth. Digitally native female-led start-ups have launched to make sexual wellness, as well as vaginal and menstrual care, products more accessible. Retailers such as Unfabled, the e-commerce start-up dedicated to women’s health and well-being, “are demonstrating the market need for specialized, women’s health and cycle-specific product categories that will continue to grow,” Butterworth said.
In early 2024, Unfabled secured $1.6 million in funding, bringing its total investment $2 million. The financial injection helped founder Hannah Samano create a range of female-focused supplements, Unfabled Essentials, which were featured in the UK’s leading health and beauty retailer, Boots, months later.
Overcoming retail hurdles requires resourceful marketing, innovative packaging, persistent buyer education, and, increasingly, shifts in public and retailer perception, which are challenging to achieve when ad bans and algorithmic shadow banning occur.
Data and Digital Censorship
Marketing is an uphill battle for intimate wellness. Digital censorship and limited advertising channels mean retail buyers must be convinced that a brand can drive its own demand without relying heavily on platform-led promotion. This also makes the pitch that much harder.
Femtech is routinely denied access to paid media on Meta, TikTok, and even search, while male-focused brands for products such as erectile dysfunction meds or beard growth oils face far fewer restrictions. The same kind of marketing misogyny applies to language around vaginal and sexual health.
According to a 2025 report by the Center for Intimacy Justice, which delved into the censorship of intimate femtech and reproductive health for women and other gender-diverse individuals, 84% of businesses had ads rejected on Meta, 66% had ads rejected on Google, and 64% had product listings removed on Amazon.
Butterworth noted that female founders face every kind of rejection and suppression imaginable. To help, Clio Wood, a women's health and sex positivity journalist and advocate, co-founded CensHERship to end censorship of women’s health content online.
In June 2025, the UK-based campaign released its own research, speaking with 95 founders, medical professionals, consumers, and charities: 95% reported at least one issue with the censorship of women’s health and/or sexual well-being content online (38% reported 10 or more in the last 12 months). Ninety percent divulged issues with Instagram; 52% with Facebook; 32% on TikTok; 15% on YouTube; and 11% on LinkedIn.
Issues with censorship extend beyond the loss of revenue and the concealment of critical health information—digital suppression also impacts AI training data, as systems learn from platforms that systematically exclude or penalize content related to women's health. The AI healthcare market is projected to grow from $39.25 billion in 2025 to $504.17 billion by 2032—femtech is a significant factor, as it is increasingly integrated into products and services.
Other problems facing femtech are data-based: Regulatory ambiguity surrounding the privacy of sexual wellness apps adds another layer of complexity. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against Flo Health, a London-based company, for misleading consumers regarding its handling of sensitive health data. In 2025, a federal jury in California found Meta liable for violating California privacy law by allegedly using period-tracking data from the app without user consent.
But Berlin-based Clue states it is obligated to apply "special protections" to reproductive health data, as it operates under European law. The app conducted its own survey and found that 85% of its community members say they want their anonymized data to be used for health research, which is why it's committed to utilizing its international datasets to help find solutions and root causes of common conditions, addressing the gender health gaps in medical research.
With more data at their disposal, companies in the intimate wellness industry now have further scientific evidence to support their boardroom presentations with valid market opportunities. “Bring in as many proof points as possible, even before launch,” Fratczak said. “Think user interviews, expert input, prevalence data, or pilot collaborations. If clinical evidence isn’t available yet, look for partnerships that can help de-risk your proposition, whether through research, distribution, or validation.”
These data and privacy concerns make investors wary, slowing product development and further complicating the path to scale. But the more intimate femtech start-ups focus on transparency and the data at their fingertips, the less likely they are to struggle.
Break the Cycle of Stigma and Scale
The aforementioned white paper from CensHERship outlined how policymakers are vital in enforcing gender-sensitive digital regulations to provide intimate femtech with equal opportunities in the digital economy. “Oftentimes it's a matter of transparency,” Gerner added. “The first tampon was invented in the 1930s, and the first study looking at trace metals found in tampons only came out last year. We need much stricter regulation around the ingredients of period products, for example.”
Companies can leverage data to demonstrate the urgent business case for addressing online bias—as well as the importance of public perception in the fight against outdated narratives. “Don’t underestimate the power of strong, repetitive user metrics; anything that shows consistent behavior or demand will help prove this isn’t a one-off use case, but a genuine need waiting to be solved,” Fratczak said.
Closing the women’s health gap could add $1 trillion to the global economy annually. This highlights the economic costs of underfunding and undersupporting intimate wellness.
According to Gerner, a scaled vagina economy would create “a world where women don't suffer unnecessary pain or unnecessary side effects; a world where our bodies are understood, well-researched, innovated for, respected, and appreciated on a societal scale.”
