Although women make up half of the population, women’s health companies receive only about 2% of healthcare venture capital funds. A new initiative recently launched by the Nonprofit Women’s Health Visits Affairs (WHAM) is intended to change that.
WHAM focuses on increasing awareness and funding for women’s health research. It introduced a new program this month, known as the Innovator Circle, and joined the leaders of the Women-Centered Fund.
The founding members include AHA Go Red for Women Venture Fund, Amboy Street Ventures, Avestria, Catalytic Impact Foundation, Coyote Ventures, Cross Border Impact Ventures, Digital DX Ventures, Emmeline Ventures, Foreground Capital, Goddess Gaia Ventures, Kaya Ventures, Kidron Capital, March of Dimes, Next Ventures, NextBlue, Seae Ventures, Swizzle Ventures, The Sparrow Fund, US Fertility and Zeal Capital Partners.
Carolee Lee, founder and CEO of WHAM, said the network has four main priorities.
- Accelerate early innovation in women’s health
- Strengthening women’s health funding through partnerships with late-stage capital partners
- Identify “breakthroughs in different, disproportionate, or merely affecting women”, such as cardiovascular disease, neuroscience or autoimmune disease
- Create a more “coordinated investment pipeline that connects early innovation with scale investment and wider market deployment”
“By creating a circle of innovators, WHAM brings together an early group of investors to catalyze discovery, build stronger pipelines and strategic investment avenues in this high potential sector,” Lee said in an email. “Our goal is to promote the capital, connectivity and coordination needed to change the investment landscape of women’s health.”
Naseem Sayani, operations consultant for women’s investment and consultant in the capital of Taji Capital, will serve as director of the innovator circle.
“It’s the pipeline engine,” Sayani said in a statement. “The innovator circle brings together investors best suited to recognize early innovation and build bridges to the scale of capital.”
Wham has several other collaboration plans. These include WHAM Research Collaborative, a global network of researchers and clinicians; WHAM Investment Collaborative is a coalition of investment leaders dedicated to increasing private investment in women’s health; and WHAM Life Sciences Collaborative, a group of industry leaders that facilitates the inclusion of gender-based biology at all stages of product development.
Although women’s health has long been invested in, it has begun to attract more interest from venture capitalists. At the Medcity Invest meeting in Chicago last week, Raffi Boyajian, an investor and principal of Cigna Ventures, spoke in a panel about women’s health as a priority for the company, especially chronic diseases that affect women.
“I think women’s health is a bit inappropriate,” he said. “It’s like half the population. It’s just health. Cigna focuses on the business population. So when we think about women in the workplace, what are the chronic conditions related to it, especially to keep them working, to keep them healthy?”
Photo: Asnidamarwani, Getty Images
