Rewriting the Playbook: Women Founders and the Future of Women's Health
Staša Stanković, Co-Founder and CEO of OvartiX, Laura Yecies, Founder and CEO of Osteoboost Health, and Pooja Majmudar, Investment Partner at KELES, join host Sara Rico, Senior Customer Account Manager at Microsoft, for a People and Planet United conversation on the science, evidence, capital, and business models shaping the future of women's health.
The session begins with a historical fact, that women were not required in United States clinical trials until 1993 and that female biology remains under-researched, with the ovaries among the least targeted organs in pharma. Stanković frames women's health as a trillion-dollar scientific frontier, Yecies describes what it takes to generate evidence and build a market for bone health where innovation has long been absent, and Majmudar presses the discussion toward smart capital, patient capital, partnerships, reimbursement, and the technology and AI infrastructure that increasingly determines which companies reach the market.
The conversation refuses to treat women's health as a niche or a single category. Its central message is that women's health is a life-course continuum shaped by biology, evidence, access, and capital, and that progress depends on generating female-specific data, building strong partnerships, taking a longer time horizon that rewards prevention, and being loud about problems that were kept quiet for too long.
Session Intelligence
This session examines women's health through the lens of scientific opportunity, evidence generation, capital, technology, reimbursement, and the life-course view of care. Its central insight is that women's health is a large and investable frontier rather than a niche, and that progress depends on female-specific data, patient capital, strong partnerships, and a refusal to collapse very different businesses into a single category.
Female Biology, Under-Researched
Women were not required in United States clinical trials until 1993, and the ovaries remain among the least targeted organs in pharma, leaving a scientific frontier open at the DNA level.
A Market, Not a Charity Case
McKinsey estimates a trillion-dollar opportunity, long mistaken for a niche because underfunding kept the science, and the market, from being measured.
Evidence Changes the Pattern
Long trials and hard science are expensive, yet the evidence founders generate is what shifts investor and industry perceptions of what is investable.
Beyond the Category
Drug discovery, devices, and apps follow very different paths to market and should not be clumped together as one femtech bucket.
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