Rewriting the Playbook: Women Founders and the Future of Women's Health
Women's health is entering a more consequential stage of innovation, where scientific discovery, clinical evidence, capital formation, technology, reimbursement, and patient voice must be connected across the full course of women's lives. In this People and Planet United session, Sara Rico, Senior Customer Account Manager at Microsoft, hosts Rewriting the Playbook: Women Founders and the Future of Women's Health, a leadership conversation with Staša Stanković, Co-Founder and CEO of OvartiX, Laura Yecies, Founder and CEO of Osteoboost Health, and Pooja Majmudar, Investment Partner at KELES.
The conversation examines what it takes to build and scale women's health innovations in a system historically built with insufficient attention to women’s biology, evidence needs, and care pathways. It follows the path from discovery to delivery: how female-specific biology becomes investable science, how medical devices earn evidence and adoption, how reimbursement and partnerships shape access, and how technology and AI can strengthen the infrastructure needed to bring solutions to market. The result is a practical view of women's health as a serious field of healthcare innovation, rather than a collection of disconnected conditions or point solutions.
Staša Stanković brings the drug-discovery perspective, focusing on ovarian biology, menopause, infertility, PCOS, and the root causes of conditions that have received too little scientific attention. Laura Yecies brings the operator's view from bone health, where large patient need has not been matched by sufficient innovation, treatment options, or reimbursement pathways. Pooja Majmudar brings the investor's lens, emphasizing smart capital, patient capital, infrastructure, commercialization strategy, and the importance of understanding the very different market paths followed by therapeutics, devices, digital health, and consumer solutions.
For the very first time, we managed to unlock the root causes of some of these conditions.
— Staša Stanković, OvartiXA System That Was Not Built Around Women
Sara Rico sets the frame for the session by describing women's health as a life-course continuum shaped by biology, evidence, access, and capital. That framing matters because much of modern healthcare was built without a sufficient understanding of female biology. Stanković notes that women were not required to be included in clinical trials in the United States until 1993, leaving many medicines and research pathways shaped around the male body as the default.
The consequences extend from research to investment and from product development to care delivery. When a condition is not studied, it is harder to measure. When it is not measured, it is harder to fund. When it is not funded, the market does not develop. Stanković describes this as a domino effect, one that helps explain why major areas of women's health remained underbuilt even as need was visible across generations.
The leadership challenge is to move from awareness to infrastructure. Better outcomes in women's health require the data, disease models, clinical evidence, financing structures, regulatory strategies, and commercialization pathways that other major areas of medicine have built over decades. The session makes clear that progress depends on treating women's health as a central healthcare innovation priority, with scientific and business rigor equal to the scale of the need.
Female Biology as a Scientific Frontier
Stanković's work at OvartiX begins with the premise that women's health cannot advance without female-specific data. Her research goes to the DNA level, comparing genetic differences between healthy women and women diagnosed with specific conditions to understand what is driving disease and where therapies can be developed. The company's first focus is medically induced menopause in cancer patients, where chemotherapy and radiotherapy can severely damage ovarian reserve and push young women and girls into premature menopause decades too early.
OvartiX plans to expand from that starting point into natural menopause, infertility, and PCOS. The larger significance is the organ system at the center of the work. Stanković points to the ovaries as central to women's health and among the least targeted organs in the pharmaceutical industry. Unlocking ovarian biology therefore creates both a scientific frontier and a major market opportunity.
We have to do analysis, and we have to have data. Female-specific data.
— Staša Stanković, OvartiXThe opportunity is also commercial. Stanković cites McKinsey's estimate of a one-trillion-dollar women's health opportunity and argues that the scale follows from decades of under-research and underinvestment. As more human genetics data becomes available, she sees women's health entering a stage similar to where cardiometabolic health stood before the wave of innovation that reshaped obesity and metabolic treatment.
Bone Health and the Work of Market Creation
Yecies brings the medical-device and operator perspective through Osteoboost Health. Bone health is a large unmet need, yet it has not received the level of innovation its scale would suggest. She notes that 60 million Americans have low bone density and that half of all women will fracture. The condition is widespread, serious, and deeply connected to independence, longevity, and quality of life.
The challenge is not only scientific. It is also the work of market creation. Yecies describes the skepticism that can surround a field where patients have long been expected to accept limited options. Her view is that the absence of existing solutions should be understood as evidence of opportunity, not evidence of indifference. Women care about their bones, she argues, and early commercial experience supports the idea that demand becomes clearer when a credible product exists.
Women do care about their bones. They don't want to get frail and fracture like they saw happen to their mothers and aunts and grandmothers.
— Laura Yecies, Osteoboost HealthHer comparison to categories such as ride-hailing and menopause care is useful. Markets that seem difficult to size often become clearer once an innovation changes behavior, economics, or access. In bone health, that means building both trust and evidence while showing that prevention and intervention can matter long before a fracture occurs.
Smart Capital and the Infrastructure Gap
Majmudar places capital at the center of the women's health opportunity, but she is careful to distinguish capital from smart capital. Women's health has too often been treated as a cause rather than a commercial field capable of producing meaningful outcomes and returns. Her experience across science, venture, and founder networks points to a field that has gained attention but still lacks the depth of financing, infrastructure, and reference points needed for consistent company formation and exits.
The moment is now, and we need capital, but we also need smart capital.
— Pooja Majmudar, KELESShe notes that funding has increased, with strong activity in 2024, but that much of the capital still flows toward fertility and maternal health. That focus matters, especially when one in three counties in the United States is a maternity care desert, yet it also shows how much of the broader women's health landscape remains underdeveloped. Conditions related to female biology, chronic prevention, bone health, menopause, ovarian function, and long-term care pathways require serious scientific and commercial investment.
The companies Majmudar finds most compelling are not only building products. They are also tackling the underbuilt infrastructure around those products, including evidence, commercialization strategy, reimbursement planning, partnerships, and go-to-market execution. In that sense, the strongest women's health companies are building more than solutions; they are helping create the market systems that should have existed earlier.
Technology as Infrastructure for Scale
Technology and AI enter the conversation as infrastructure for scale. Majmudar points to the enormous volume of data generated across healthcare and warns that the existing women's health data gap widens as the broader healthcare data environment expands. The companies that stand out are those using technology as a true infrastructure layer, as a genuine operating layer to improve commercialization, patient reach, decision-making, and market access.
Rico reinforces the point from the Microsoft perspective, noting how difficult it is for companies in women's health to drive meaningful innovation without technology. Used well, technology can help close long-standing gaps in data, access, care coordination, and patient engagement. Used casually, it risks becoming another label that fails to solve the underlying problem.
The leadership distinction is important. Technology strengthens science, evidence, and reimbursement strategy when it is built into the operating model from the beginning. In women's health, the opportunity is to use technology and AI to make the field more measurable, more scalable, and more connected to the realities of patients and providers.
Evidence, Reimbursement, and Time
Evidence is the bridge between innovation and adoption. Yecies explains that osteoporosis and osteopenia clinical trials typically require at least a year of intervention, followed by patient recruitment and data analysis. For a small startup, that is a major investment. Osteoboost Health was able to advance with significant NIH grant support in addition to outside capital, but the timeline reflects a broader challenge across women's health: rigorous evidence takes time, and companies need financing structures that understand that reality.
Reimbursement adds another layer. Osteoboost Health currently operates without reimbursement, which makes the device self-pay. Yecies notes that medical devices usually take longer than drugs to obtain reimbursement, and broad adoption will require coverage pathways that support distribution at scale. Majmudar adds that women already bear higher out-of-pocket healthcare costs and that direct-to-consumer, employer-benefit, and self-pay channels may all become part of the business model for companies in the space.
Tracking a problem is not the same as solving it.
— Staša Stanković, OvartiXPartnerships also matter. Majmudar emphasizes the need for founders to think early about reimbursement, regulatory strategy, and partnerships that genuinely strengthen commercialization rather than simply adding credibility to a presentation. The companies most likely to endure will be those that treat evidence, payment, access, and partnership strategy as part of the product from the beginning.
Beyond a Single Category
One of the most important points in the conversation is the need for more precise language around women's health. Stanković challenges the tendency to place very different businesses into one broad bucket. A company developing an app and a company pursuing hardcore drug discovery may both serve women, but they have fundamentally different timelines, capital needs, evidence requirements, regulatory pathways, and commercialization models.
That distinction is not semantic. It affects how investors evaluate companies, how partners engage, how the public understands the field, and how founders build credibility. Stanković argues that companies like OvartiX should be part of the same drug-development conversations as companies working in type 2 diabetes, heart failure, or other major therapeutic areas, rather than being separated into a catchall category.
Do not pitch a category.
— Pooja Majmudar, KELESMajmudar reaches a similar conclusion from the investment side. The lack of early support helped produce an overreliance on point solutions and the emergence of a category label that can obscure more than it explains. A more mature women's health market will require segmentation by science, product type, care pathway, reimbursement model, and time to market.
A Longer Horizon for Prevention
Yecies offers one of the clearest leadership lessons in the session: women's health needs a longer time horizon. She points to cardiovascular medicine, where early screening for blood pressure and cholesterol in a person's thirties can prevent serious events later in life. That long-view approach has helped produce meaningful progress in cardiovascular care. Similar thinking could reshape areas such as bone health, frailty, menopause, and chronic prevention.
To me, that's like a North Star. How can we have that level of progress in women's health?
— Laura Yecies, Osteoboost HealthThe economics change when the time horizon expands. Preventing bone loss or reducing fracture risk may not fit neatly into a short-term calculation, but public payers and health systems ultimately bear the consequences of fractures and frailty later in life. A more complete model of women's health would measure value across decades, not only across annual budgets or near-term adoption cycles.
That perspective connects back to Rico's life-course framing. Women's health cannot be treated as a set of disconnected episodes. It requires a view of prevention, treatment, and quality of life that begins earlier, lasts longer, and accounts for biological changes across the lifespan.
Patient Voice and the Work Ahead
The session closes with a return to voice and persistence. Yecies offers persistence as her advice to women leaders and health innovators. Majmudar urges founders not to pitch a category. Stanković calls for greater openness about painful, frustrating, and long-ignored health experiences, pointing to the role of patients in making invisible problems visible.
It's the patient. It's the voice of the patient.
— Staša Stanković, OvartiXThe future of women's health will be shaped by the ability to connect discovery, evidence, capital, technology, reimbursement, and patient voice into a more complete model of care across women's lives. That requires female-specific data, rigorous evidence generation, meaningful partnerships, and a longer horizon for prevention, drug discovery, bone health, menopause, infertility, and other conditions that develop across decades rather than quarters.
The opportunity now is to move beyond fragmented categories and build a stronger innovation ecosystem for women's health, one that supports persistence, invests in serious science, listens to patients, and advances solutions capable of improving prevention, treatment, longevity, and quality of life across generations.
