2025 Global Women’s Health Investment Hit A Record, But U.S. Investors Curb Their Enthusiasm
By Geri Stengel, Contributor.
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Geri Stengel writes about the success factors of women entrepreneurs.
Jul 15, 2026, 09:00am EDT
Tubulis, a German oncology company developing antibody-drug conjugates for ovarian and lung cancer, raised the largest women's health round of 2025 at €308 million (~$340 million).
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Women's health investment reached a milestone in 2025. A new report from the W. Group, the 1st Global Women's Health Investment Report , tracks roughly $1.55 billion in disclosed equity across 85 companies and declares the arrival of what it calls "the Era of Scale."
- Institutional-scale rounds doubled.
- A brand-new therapeutic category appeared: GLP-1 and metabolic health.
- Capital spread across more conditions and countries than in any prior year.
Yet the early-stage investors deploying that capital describe a more complicated reality, where a record headline coexists with a category still arguing for its legitimacy, and generalist VCs still don’t recognize the opportunity. Generalist VCs matter because they have deep pockets to fund future investment rounds that these companies need to reach their full potential.
The momentum is real. So is the skepticism about what it actually proves.
What The Record Number Is Really Measuring
The report's central claim is that capital stopped concentrating in a few breakout names and began to distribute. In 2024, the top three rounds captured 39% of all equity. In 2025, the top three accounted for 32%, while capital below that layer grew 56% year over year.
But the largest 2025 round went to Tubulis, a German oncology company whose cancer pipeline spans ovarian and lung indications. Asked whether that represents women's health scaling or oncology scaling, Jessica Kamada, managing partner of Swizzle Ventures and a member of Women’s Health Access Matters’ (WHAM) Innovator's Circle, does not hedge. It is, she notes, "oncology scaling with women's health taking the credit."
The report's head of content, Molly Taylor, does not dispute the point so much as reframe it. "Strip oncology out entirely and the rest of the 2025 ecosystem still raised roughly $970 million across 14 categories," she notes, "nearly matching the whole of 2024's total, including oncology." The stronger signal, in her reading, is breadth: "$50 million+ rounds went from touching three categories to seven, which is not one sector inflating a headline, it's capital flowing across the board."
Her larger point is not that the progress is fake. It is that the capital chases a narrow profile. Investors "want to invest in kind of AI-native companies," Kamada observes, which leaves "many gaps in women's health that the general VC community is missing."
Naseem Sayani, an investor and director of WHAM's Innovator's Circle, frames the same caution more bluntly: "Growth alone doesn't deliver a mature investment category." Sayani also advises Women's Health Week USA, the summit that the W. Group produces alongside the report.
Why The Deadliest Conditions Stay Unfunded
The report is unusually candid about its own gaps. Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in women, drew $2 million in dedicated equity in 2025. Autoimmune conditions, roughly 80% of which affect women, drew zero. Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS, formerly known as PCOS), which affects roughly one in 10 women of reproductive age, attracted a single seed round.
The report attributes this to a lack of conviction. The investors point to structure. Sayani argues the field keeps funding the wrong unit. "We're still investing in women's health as a collection of individual conditions rather than as an interconnected biological system," she says. The money stays away, in her reading, because innovation is trapped inside single-condition businesses that struggle to show venture-scale returns.
Kamada supplies the arithmetic underneath that struggle. Generalist investors, she explains, treat these conditions as "niche markets on top of niche markets," then shrink the math further. A sub-$100 million fund can underwrite a billion-dollar outcome. A multibillion-dollar fund needs a $5 billion outcome. When a condition affects "only" a slice of women, it fails the larger fund's model regardless of clinical urgency.
Taylor points to menopause as the template for what unlocks a stalled category. It flipped, she explains, "when clinical reframing met a proof-of-concept company (Midi Health) and a cultural moment that followed—celebrity investment, retail adoption, mainstream media."
Cardiovascular disease, by contrast, "already has the clinical evidence but is still waiting for both the breakout company and the cultural conversation that forces the category into existence." The obstacle is not the science. "Most people still don't know heart disease is the leading killer of women," she observes, "and no one has yet built the venture-scale model that gives institutional investors a reason to write the check."
The Lived-Experience Gap In The Room
Kamada's proposed fix is not another pitch deck. It's about having different people at the table. "How do we put more women in those investment committee rooms?" she asks, to vouch that a silent, under-recognized condition is real and investable. Absent that lived experience, she suggests, the strongest metrics still struggle to command attention against a flashier technology deal in the same meeting.
When Success Means Dropping The Label
The most counterintuitive theme running through these conversations is that the phrase "women's health" may now hurt more than it helps at the fundraising table. Sayani puts it plainly. The framing "has become ineffective as a fundraising framework," and founders should lead with the market and the economics instead.
Kamada stops short of telling founders to abandon the term, but her guidance runs parallel. Companies find "more success with generalist investors when they label something, let's say, as infrastructure," she notes, describing a recent precision-medicine deal for women that led with the science and kept the category label quiet. The tension is real: The sector fought for years to name itself, and the name has become a cost.
That reframing echoes a broader repositioning strategy other founders now use to reach generalist capital.
Where The Optimists And Skeptics Split
On exits, the investors diverge in ways that clarify the stakes. Colleen Foster, a partner at Amboy Street Ventures, sees a market others underrate. "The exit infrastructure is far stronger than many investors appreciate," she contends, describing companies financed at discounted valuations and acquired at premium prices by pharma, diagnostics, and device makers, as well as private equity.
Kamada is more wary. The public window has cracked open after recent digital health IPOs, she acknowledges, but the decisive buyers remain absent. "The strategic M&A players have yet to be announced" in women's health, she cautions, and the sector still needs billion-dollar-plus exits it cannot yet source. Sayani splits the difference, casting strategics as the "sleeping giant" that could tilt the exit environment once large healthcare acquirers recognize the untapped revenue.
The Era Of Scale Is Real, And Incomplete
None of these investors disputes the direction of travel. More capital entered women's health in 2025 than ever before, more conditions got funded, and more institutions wrote checks they would have skipped two years ago. The report documents a genuine shift, and its own "work that remains" section names the same gaps its backers describe.
Taylor is willing to name what would prove the thesis wrong. "The number that would prove us wrong isn't total capital," she argues, since "a single mega-round can inflate that." The real test is "the count of categories producing $50M+ rounds, which went from three to seven. If that falls back in 2026, then 2025 was a spike, not a structural shift."
Her second warning sign is the one the investors keep returning to. Both years produced 35 to 40 seed rounds, but only 20 to 25 reached Series A. If that conversion rate has not improved by next year's report, "then the sector is producing more companies than the capital infrastructure can graduate," she says.
The distance between a record year and a mature market is the story the headline number cannot tell on its own. As Kamada frames the moment, "It's amazing to see more capital going into women's health, and we still have a lot of work to do."
The scale is coming into focus. The conviction to back the conditions that need it most has yet to follow.
