Health tech is a prime example of an industry where having women in leadership roles is important. Women offer unique perspectives and help create tools that address the health needs of everyone. To celebrate International Women’s day, we want to highlight 10 women trailblazers leading the way in FemTech and HealthTech across the globe.

Every year, HolonIQ identifies the top 1000 Health Tech startups globally. Region by region, we map the most promising Health Tech startups, both early and late stage. In 2022, we announced the Africa Health Tech 50, Australia and New Zealand Health Tech 100, East Asia Health Tech 200, Europe Health Tech 200, South Asia Health Tech 100, LATAM Health Tech 50, Middle East and North Africa Health Tech 50, North America Health Tech 200 and Southeast Asia Health Tech 50. To be eligible, these companies must be startups (i.e. not acquired, controlled or listed), operating in the field of digital health, medtech, biotech or broadly health technology, and less than 10 years old.

Health Tech is a fast-growing tech sector that’s enhancing the way the health and medicine industry can operate. Technological innovations such as AI and Blockchain will be instrumental in enabling current and emerging Health Tech companies to meet the demands of consumers.

Here are seven women's health tech startups that raised significant funding, and their profiles, in the last year.

Indeed, women today are reimagining the field of health tech and, in so doing, they are revolutionizing healthcare for all.

The theme for International Women’s Day 2022 is ‘Break the Bias’, in which society is encouraged to celebrate women’s achievements, in turn raising awareness against bias and inspiring positive action for equality. Though the initiative is interdisciplinary, the drug discovery, life science and pharmaceutical world boasts many achievements of this nature. DDW’s Megan Thomas has highlighted the achievements of inspirational women who have achieved great things in the industry.

In this post, we decided to highlight eleven entrepreneurial women, leading the way in applying advanced computational technologies, such as machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and other artificial intelligence (AI) components, for tackling some of the hardest challenges of science -- in drug discovery and healthcare. This list is composed in alphabetical order.

They’re working in the femtech space as founders and CEOs, combining business with a mission to make knowledge about women’s bodies more accessible and usable in discussions around healthcare.

Earlier this week an investor asked me why women can’t just get VC funding. “Am I missing something?” he asked. I took a deep breath and dropped the facts about the culture and economy of men funding men.

Confronting gender inequality in healthcare & biomedical science

When it comes to women in health tech, the imbalance is similar to what you would find in STEM overall (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). Figures show that in health technology specifically, only one woman in five people are working in the industry.

When I learned that a tech start-up in India called Niramai has created an affordable handheld device to screen for breast cancer, I had a great surge of hope. Three much-loved women in my family died far too soon because their breast cancers went undetected until it was too late, which is true for a majority of breast cancer patients in my country. Only 1% to 8% of Indian women are diagnosed in the early ‘stage 1’ period of the disease, compared to 60% to 70% of patients in the United States.