By Estrella Jaramillo, Contributor, Forbes | August 26, 2019

Women’s Equality Day commemorates the 1920 adoption of Amendment XIX, which prohibits the States and the Federal Government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Just 99 years ago, women finally achieved the right to vote.

A lot of progress has been made since then. However, as we celebrate this day, we must recognize the evidence that indicates how much work lays ahead of us. Comprehensive women’s healthcare is still not guaranteed. Women still experience fear and lack of body-agency when walking into the birthing room. As a society, we forget mothers because their “perceived productivity” for the economy decreases, instead of rethinking if the status quo serves all humans equally. The advertising industry often profits from sexualizing women bodies, yet we don’t enjoy the benefits of comprehensive sexual health and consent standards of education. Entire industries are built on making women feel like they have to attain a specific beauty standard, then they are pushed to the sidelines once they are past a certain age. Women make most healthcare decisions, yet they have trouble raising money to build companies that have women’s well-being at the center.

We are not there yet.

These women investors are making great contributions to gender equality in the XXI century in a dual way. First, they are making capital accessible to women and femme startup founders and providing them with resources to build their companies. Additionally, as was the case of the investors in the previous edition of this article, they are investing in a category whose sole purpose is that of improving women’s health and quality of life, building innovative tools to help them navigate the physical, psychological – and even logistic! – changes that are part of a woman’s health journey.

Halle Tecco, Angel Investor, Techhammer

Halle Tecco founded venture fund and incubator Rock Health, the first ever incubator for digital health startups. She raised money from Kleiner Perkins and NEA, among others. Today, Tecco is an active angel investor and Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and Advisor to the Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics.

Her portfolio includes high-growth, women-founded Femtech startups like Wildflower Health, Kindbody, Ask tia, and Everlywell. Tecco steps in pretty early, in the pre-seed angel round and offers capital as well as her invaluable digital health expertise.

Tecco looks to invest in companies that have women in their leadership team. In fact, she is unapologetically vocal about the reality that even in the fertility space, a very delicate category that has a high impact on women’s (and families) lives, many organizations’ executive leadership teams and boards are still exclusively constituted by men.

“Just under 10% of digital health CEO’s are women. If there’s one industry where we need women leaders the most, it would be healthcare. And especially women’s health. In fact, Sophia Yen, Founder of Pandia Health, is the only female founder/CEO in the birth control space, and is the one that has had the hardest time fundraising,” says Tecco.

Tecco is staunch supporter of women innovating women’s health, and is soon launching another venture herself.

Natalia Oberti Noguera, Pipeline Angles

Natalia Oberti Noguera is the Founder and CEO ofPipeline Angels, an organization changing the face of angel investing and creating capital for women and non-binary femme social entrepreneurs. Pipeline members serve as the friends and family round for entrepreneurs who may not already have support at that critical stage.

Pipeline Angels members have invested more than $6 million in over 70 w​omen- and non-binary femme-​led for-profit social ventures via their signature pitch summit process. In the Femtech category, Pipeline’s portfolio includes theBloomi, Mahmee, TheraB Medical and Saathi Pads.

Oberti Noguera believes in making the Femtech category more inclusive: “I’m passionate about making sure that we’re not perpetuating the systems that we’re aiming to disrupt —while the femtech ecosystem has a lack of cis women entrepreneurs getting funded at a similar rate to cis guy founders, we need to ensure a broader and more inclusive healthtech space that doesn’t erase non-binary and trans founders, their solutions, and their communities.”

Earlier this summer, Pipeline Angels portfolio company Mahmee —a tech startup disrupting prenatal and postpartum care launched by Melissa Hanna, a Black woman founder— secured $3 million in funding from Serena Williams, Arlan Hamilton, and Mark Cuban. Pipeline Angels members first invested in Mahmee in 2015 and many participated in the current round.

“For me, getting more women and femmes of color to invest in more women and femmes of color is about creating and building more wealth in our communities. It’s moving beyond equality to encompass equity,” concludes Oberti Noguera.

Jenny Abramson, Rethink Impact

Rethink Impact is the largest, US-based impact venture capital firm with a gender lens that invests in female leaders using technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. Rethink helps companies that have product market fit scale and includes names like Univfy and Winnie in its portfolio. Jenny Abramson, Founder and Managing Partner, emphasizes the organization’s commitment to supporting gender and race diverse founding teams.

“It’s been widely researched that diverse teams perform better. At Rethink Impact, we invest in tech companies with gender diverse management teams, a majority of which have female CEOs. We specifically focus on what we refer to as “the valley of death”: Male CEOs of tech companies are three times more likely to raise a series B if they’ve raised a Seed (Mattermark and Techcrunch). If we can collectively support women with institutional capital in getting through their A and B rounds, their financial results and business traction will speak for themselves when they go to raise their Series C,” says Abramson.

Abramson points out that they look for scalability and less capital intensive opportunities and is excited about tech-based solutions that address the Sustainable Development Goals. Fields like digital health and AI are of interest, as well as solutions to access and affordability for underserved communities.

“Women control 80% of healthcare decisions, and are 75% more likely than men to use digital health solutions (Frost & Sullivan). We have invested in a range of health tech solutions, including tackling cognitive decline (two thirds of people impacted by Alzheimer’s are women (Greensburg)), solving inefficiencies in the fertility space, or attacking the mental health crisis. We also invest in other pieces of the FemTech continuum that cross economic empowerment, education, motherhood, and beyond,” concludes Abramson.

Maria Velissaris, SteelSky Ventures

Maria Velissaris is the Founding Partner of SteelSky Ventures, and a member at Pipeline Angels. SteelSky focuses exclusively on women’s health and looks for post-revenue companies led by women in large addressable market categories ($1B+). Investment size usually ranges $150k-$500k.

Velissaris supports female founders by democratizing access to capital: “The VC industry tends to be opaque and connecting to capital is difficult, especially for underrepresented populations. We want to be the first stop for any founder innovating in the women’s healthcare space. We accept cold emails, LinkedIn requests, and other non-traditional ways to connect, because the only way to change the system, is to operate differently,” emphasizes Velissaris.

Women’s health has long been considered a “niche category” in the investment community, and that’s something Velissaris feels passionate about changing. According to a recent NEA report, women’s healthcare is a $4.8T market opportunity (OECD, 2016). “Is that niche? By ignoring and under-funding the sector, investors are not only missing out on returns, but also hindering the commercialization of valuable treatments, products and services that could improve health and save lives,” she adds.

SteelSky Ventures operates with the goal of generating the best returns for LPs while also applying an inclusive and diversified approach “We are sourcing from communities that are largely overlooked,” Velissaris concludes.

Jesse Draper, Halogen Ventures

Halogen Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund focused on female founded consumer technologies. Jesse Draper, Founding Partner and Managing Director, believes in dedicating attention to and plugging each of their portfolio companies into a strategic network of advisors, investors and accelerators in the greater venture community to help them grow and succeed.

Draper’s portfolio includes Femtech companies Naya Health, as well as L. (acquired) and Flex in the feminine hygiene categories, one of the ripest for innovation. “I invested in Flex, a menstrual disc that serves as an alternate tampon device created out of the need for less yeast infections. The founder, Lauren Schulte, couldn’t wear tampons due to her own yeast infections. It turns out, there is an enormous community of women who had this same issue. Tampons are a multi billion dollar industry alone and Lauren created an entirely new vertical of opportunity. Imagine what other types of billion dollar industries we could uncover if we did more research on the female body brain, heart and all,” adds Draper.

Lack of research and development in this area creates gaps that women are tackling. Draper points out to the need to study the female brain: “I recently went to an event on women’s brain health and learned that most research is done on the male brain. When we talk about women’s health, there’s a huge gap in funding both on the research and the startup side.”

Draper is very intentional about exclusively backing startups that have women in the leadership team: “There is now more data supporting that women in leadership teams directly impacts the performance of a company in all industries. We’ve had 2 $100 Million exits in the last year so this strategy is working for us,” she adds.

Based on data from its Global Gender Gap Index, the World Economic Forum recently estimated that it will take the United States another 208 years to reach gender equality – at the current pace. These investors are joined in the quest for equity acceleration by organizations aimed at tackling this imbalance, such as The Vinetta Project and VC Include.

VC include is an advocacy organization founded and led by Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson that connects female and diverse emerging managers in the Venture Capital and Impact Investment space with LPs that care about returns, impact and inclusion across the lens of gender, ethnicity, sexual identity and race.

Women leaders are building an ecosystem where women and femme founders can thrive and have access to the same financial and wealth creation opportunities than men -way before year 2227.

Original Article