Artificial intelligence has the power to drive positive change in healthcare, but its application also creates ethical risks and commercialization challenges.
In May 2026, the Women's Health AI Consortium launched to create the first industry body dedicated to creating an AI health landscape built with women in mind—most large language models (LLMs) are not trained on female biology. Researchers also created the Women’s Health Benchmark (WHBench) and found that no model's mean score exceeded 75% accuracy in its responses to women’s health questions, while New Scientist separately reports that AI chatbots miss urgent issues in women's health queries.
But a DIY approach to healthcare, driven by institutional misogyny and medical gaslighting, is increasingly driving women to use said generic AI-powered health tools.
“If you build AI on top of a foundation that has failed women for decades, you risk scaling those same blind spots and calling it innovation,” Taylor Hansen, Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer at Xella Health, told BeautyMatter. Built as an antidote, women’s health tech company Xella Health launched its new AI platform in June to give women a faster route to diagnosis and treatment. It combines multi-omic testing with AI to evaluate the possibility of over 130 conditions before connecting potential patients with relevant clinicians. Having raised $5.7 million since its 2023 founding, the California-based healthtech company shows what a purpose-built alternative to general-purpose chatbots could look like.
Xella is not alone: A new wave of standards and startups is emerging to fix AI’s women’s health problems.
It’s not exactly news that healthcare institutions and medical professionals mistreat women. The UN reports that even in 2026, people born with vaginas are less likely to be taken seriously, often misdiagnosed, and left to fend for themselves in medical settings and beyond.
Most recently, a September 2026 Gallup and Pivotal survey revealed that a third of US women struggle to get doctors to take their symptoms seriously, while 42% have to speak up or advocate for their health, compared with 26% of men. Released the same month, a University of St Andrews study found women to be less likely than men to receive treatment options such as surgery or painkillers even when they present with the same condition.
With many women struggling to access (or afford) healthcare, advice from social media influencers is increasingly appealing. According to Pew Research, 57% of women aged 18-29 and 52% of those aged 30-49 have sought health advice from an influencer, while Reddit and The Weber Shandwick Collective report that 81% are now comfortable discussing sensitive health topics with anonymous users on Reddit, compared to only 72% who feel comfortable discussing them with friends and family.
This DIY approach to health and well-being is also leading them towards AI-powered tools. Women and gender-nonconforming individuals are more often using Claude or ChatGPT to find solutions institutions fail to provide. In the UK, The Times reported that 53% of women aged 20-50 state they would use a chatbot for medical advice.
Recognizing the shift toward quick-query health advice, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Health in January 2026, saying over 230 million people globally ask health and wellness questions each week. It allows users to connect their medical records and biometric tracking apps like Apple Health for highly personalized results.
But LLMs perpetuate the gender data gap. AI is built on medical information that largely excludes women because vulvas were excluded from clinical trials until 1993. Inclusion, however, doesn’t necessarily close the AI training gap: A 2026 review of 574 papers found 61% included both sexes, but only 44% of those analyzed results by sex. The fact that women are also diagnosed years later than men in more than 700 conditions also compounds the results.
And this is what the researchers behind the first WHBench in 2025 wanted to interrogate. They evaluated 13 LLMs and found that models on the market demonstrate a 60% failure rate when handling women's health-specific queries—the 2025 WHBench concluded that chatbots cannot provide reliable advice on women's health. A year later, they released a follow-up report analyzing another 22 models and found that no LLM exceeded 75% accuracy on women's health clinical scenarios. Contraception was reportedly the lowest-scoring topic, with harm rates reaching as high as 90.8% (worrying, considering the state of abortion care in the US).
Separate research into the women’s health AI ecosystem outlines how communities of color are particularly affected by AI bias, which leaves many marginalized groups undereducated about their bodies and health risks. It also affects people in low-income, underserved areas. The issue is that AI is designed to engage, not treat. Forbes calls this the women’s health AI trap.
Xella Health was built to disrupt the landscape.
Kelly Lacob, Adriana Dantas, and Dr. Jesus Ching founded Xella Health to address longstanding diagnostic and treatment gaps in women’s health and well-being.
“At Xella, we start with female biology as the baseline. We bring together multiple layers of a woman’s health—her molecular data, symptoms, health history, and longitudinal data—to create a much more complete picture of what is happening in her body,” Hansen said.
The AI platform utilizes intelligent, concierge-level care, while the multi-omic testing model, Xella Health Decoded, offers a more complete picture of XX chromosome biology and disease by combining CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited lab-based or at-home blood testing with proprietary AI that fuses biomarker, genomic, hormonal, and clinical inputs to generate individualized risk profiles and care plans, which it passes to longitudinal telehealth physicians who then review the results and initiate a personalized treatment plan. Hansen explained that users also gain 24/7 access to Xella’s private, HIPAA-compliant AI health assistant, called Ella, which demystifies their health and next steps. But even with HSA/FSA eligibility, Xella’s model still requires an existing health plan, which can become a barrier for low-income or uninsured women.
In January 2026, Xella’s waitlist was 10,000 women long. By June, it had grown to 15,000 women patiently waiting for Xella’s $499 annual membership, showing strong consumer appeal for AI tools designed specifically for women. The AI platform is also a hit with investors: Capital F, Growth Factory Ventures, ImpactAssets, and more have invested in Xella Health through various angel and pre-seed funding rounds.
Then in September 2026, Xella announced its integration with Oura, which fuses the smart ring’s continuous physiologic insights with Xella’s advanced testing and personalized clinical care. “This gives women a much more complete picture of where they are today and where their health may be heading, empowering them to take greater control of their future,” Hansen said.
Xella is just one part of a broader shift towards building more accountable frameworks for AI in women’s health.
When the Women's Health AI Consortium launched in May 2026, it set out to establish clinically rigorous benchmarks, ethical standards, and transparent evaluation methods for women’s health AI.
Companies including period-tracking app Clue, recovery-tracking ring Oura, and wearable maternal pump Willow Inc., and more, formed the Consortium to close the gender data gap before AI use in healthcare becomes the norm. Its six governance commitments cover ethical standards, bias reduction, emotional and clinical quality, longitudinal intelligence, mentorship for ethical AI builders, and transparent oversight. Amanda Ducach, CEO of Ema EQ, the women’s health AI company providing insights for Willow Inc., said in the press release that "the stakes are too high to leave standards to chance,” as no framework currently governs what AI says to women, and no one in the US is accountable for it.
Hansen believes that women’s health companies in the AI space should ask more than whether the intelligence is accurate; they should also question, “What populations are represented in the underlying evidence? Has it been evaluated across different ages and life stages? Where are the clinical guardrails? And what happens after an AI-generated insight is delivered?” she said.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released nonbinding recommendations in January 2026 for AI health software and wearables, allowing technologies to be commercialized without an FDA pre-market review, registration, or compliance requirements. While it dubs fitness wearables and health tracking apps as low-risk wellness products and any products that diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate, or prevent disease as high-risk, it stays largely silent on consumer-facing AI tools such as health chatbots.
In response, women’s health is seeing an influx of AI-engineered companies. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)’s 2026 report, Innovation in Women's Health, found the average pre-money valuation for female-focused health startups to be $35 million, three times the sector’s median. SVB also noted that 2025’s only healthtech mega-round went to women’s health-focused AI chatbot Naari.
In the US, more than 80 startups sit at the intersection of AI and women's health, per data from venture capital firm Lux Capital‚—and investors are paying attention. In 2026, AI-driven fertility platform Onto Health raised a $20 million Series A; AI-powered at-home breast cancer detection company Feminai raised $6 million in seed funding; and AI-enabled network of nurse-owned practices Corner Health raised $32.5 million in seed and Series A rounds. Physician-led preventive healthcare membership company Sonata, which, like Xella, uses multi-omic-style testing (at a much higher cost of $2,500 a year), raised $7 million in seed funding, led by Lux Capital.
The opportunity for AI in women’s health may be enormous, but so is the possibility for harm when new technology automates old biases. If done well, “AI gives us an opportunity to connect decades of fragmented research and care and begin building a healthcare experience that understands women as a whole biological system, not a collection of symptoms,” Hansen added.
This is the healthcare that women deserve.