The Future of Women’s Health

Inside the Healthcare Club’s Second Annual Women's Health Summit

There is a moment, somewhere around 8 a.m. on the day of an event you’ve spent months planning, when you realize you will not actually attend your own conference. You’ll be running logistics, fielding last-minute speaker questions, and directing people toward the bathroom, not sitting in the front row absorbing the conversations you curated. That was November 8 for Jenn Arnold (MBA ’26), Andrea Gonzalez Corleto (MBA ’26), Victoria Beecroft  (MBA ’26) and me.

So when a senior venture capitalist with over 50 conferences behind her pulled us aside at the end of the day to say it was one of the best conferences she had ever attended, we didn't quite have the context to appreciate it. We had to take her word for it, and then read the notes attendees sent us (thanks Kayla and Ricky!).

What follows is our best reconstruction of a day that, by all accounts, exceeded every expectation we had for the second annual HBS Healthcare Club’s Women’s Health Summit.

The Day in Brief

More than 350 attendees. Over twenty speakers. Four panels, two fireside chats, and one keynote spanning the full arc of building a women’s health company, from founding and go-to-market strategy to funding, medical devices, scaling, and a live pitch competition. Our definition of women's health was deliberately broad: health topics that are either specific to women or disproportionately impact them. That framing opened the door to conversations about fertility, menopause, diagnostics, wearables, cardiovascular care, and much more.

“Progress Begins When You Hear the First No”

Cindy Eckert opened the summit dressed in her signature head-to-toe pink. Eckert  is the co-founder and CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, which brought Addyi, the first FDA-approved treatment for hypoactive sexual desire disorder in premenopausal women, to market after a prolonged regulatory battle. She sold her company for $1 billion, then regained control of it. Her portrait actually ran in the New York Times the week after the summit. She made people emotional and energized before 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday, which is exactly the kind of start a women’s health conference deserves.

Her message was defiant and practical: refuse the double standard and never mistake regulatory or market resistance for a verdict on your idea.

Building the Company: GTM Strategy for Women’s Health Founders

The first panel, “Digital Health GTM Winning Models” (yes, the name is very HBS; no, we are not sorry), was designed for the many students in the room who are considering founding in women’s health or joining early-stage startups. It brought together founders and operators working across the spectrum of digital women’s health, from hormone tracking and AI health companions to telehealth provider/pharmacy and enterprise medical devices: Aagya Mathur (CEO, Aavia), Amanda Ducach (CEO, Ema), Monica Cepak (CEO, Wisp), and Veronica Adamson (Head of Product & AI, Philips Healthcare)

The panel covered the real tradeoffs between DTC, payer, employer, and hybrid go-to-market strategies and offered a few pieces of advice worth writing down. Among them: “What claims matter to the people you’re trying to sell to? Build for that.” And on paid marketing: use it to test messaging early, but don’t become dependent on it and invest in organic acquisition before you scale spend.

Perhaps the most honest framing came around the question of how founders choose their GTM path: prioritize ruthlessly, pick the path with the highest chance of success, and be willing to revise.

Maven, McKinsey, and the Value-Based Care Argument

The fireside chat between Maven Clinic’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Neel Shah, and Anne Koffel, then a Partner at McKinsey & Company and now Chief Administrative Officer at CCRM Fertility, was one of the anchors of the day. Maven is often described as the first women’s health unicorn, and the conversation made it clear why: their insistence on value-based care over transactional fertility benefits forced them to build something genuinely differentiated.

The example that stuck: Maven offers a conception coach at no additional cost which improves outcomes, and in a value-based care model, is exactly the kind of thing that justifies the contract. It’s also why Maven ended up serving rural Amazon employees, a population a traditional fertility clinic would never reach. As Neel put it, digital health is uniquely positioned to reach people where health actually happens: not in a clinic, but at home, work, and in the community.

The broader framing: fertility sits at the intersection of every inequity in our society, including gender, racial, and generational inequities. Companies operating in this space that ignore that are leaving both impact and market on the table.

Funding Women’s Health: Capital Is Moving, But Not Fast Enough

The funding panel brought together investors and operators spanning early-stage venture, biotech innovation, and advocacy, moderated by Rachel Braun Scherl (Managing Partner, SPARK Solutions), a growth consultancy focused on women’s sexual and reproductive health, and featuring Anula Jayasuriya (Managing Director, Kidron Capital), Anastasia Budinskaya (Investor, NFX), Angelika Fretzen (COO, Wyss Institute), and Jodi Neuhauser (Founder & CEO, In Women’s Health). They addressed the question underlying most areas of women’s health: why has a market serving half the population been so consistently underfunded?

Their answer: a combination of structural biases in who makes investment decisions, clinical trial designs that excluded women for decades, and reimbursement systems that were simply not built with women’s health in mind. The encouraging answer: that is starting to change. Pharma is paying attention—Eli Lilly has announced a women’s health investment, and Roche is moving into women’s diagnostics.

The panel was direct about what founders need to do in the meantime: understand the actual mechanics of reimbursement, build coalitions, get to Washington and sit in on FDA hearings, and find the policy levers that are already moving at the state level. The first few major exits, with 10x and 20x returns, will change the risk calculus for the entire asset class.

Medical Devices, Wearables, and the Evidence Problem

The first afternoon panel brought together companies building at the frontier of hardware and diagnostics for women from smart rings and at-home hormone testing to thermal wearables and bone-strengthening devices: Lindsey Belknap (VP Product Marketing, Oura), Ioana Calcev (COO, Oova), Heather Ritchie (COO, Embr Labs), and Laura Yecies (CEO, Osteoboost), moderated by Geena Shah (Head of Business Operations, Evvy). They surfaced a tension running through much of women’s health hardware: how do you build a product category the healthcare system hasn’t learned to integrate yet?

Embr Labs took seven years and two product generations to find product-market fit. The companies doing it well are building not just good hardware but the body of clinical evidence that gives physicians a reason to trust it. Oura’s continuous temperature tracking, long used for cycle insights, is now being explored as a signal for late-stage pregnancy changes, drawing interest from some obstetric providers. The broader point: wearables are a new layer of clinical infrastructure.

Midi Health and the Longitudinal Care Model

In conversation with Andrea Gonzalez Corleto (MBA ‘26), Joanna Strober, founder and CEO of Midi Health, offered one of the more instructive pivots of the day. Midi started as a primary care company focused on menopause and deliberately chose not to build a subscription model, the logic being that once a woman knows which prescription she needs, the relationship changes. Instead, Midi differentiated on longitudinal care with a consistent provider, plus multiple service lines, including supplements. The bet on continuity appears to be working: Midi now serves more than 25,000 women each week and soon after the summit became a unicorn with its $100M series D round.

Her fundraising advice to female founders: treat every “no” as a “not right now” and learn to tell your story bigger and bigger until the right investor is in the room.

Scaling in the Shadows: The Stigma Tax

The final panel brought together founders and researchers working in some of the most stigmatized corners of women’s health with egg donation, period care, and healthcare for unhoused women: Professor Aziza Ahmed (Professor of Law, Boston University), Meela Imperato (Head of Marketing, Cofertility), Nadia Okamoto (co-founder, August), and Dr. Roseanna Means (Founder of Bridges to Moms, Senior Faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital). They took on something earlier sessions had circled: the cost of stigma, not just in business, but in health outcomes themselves.

Nadia Okamoto scaled August to five million TikTok followers by posting images of used pads and talking openly about period blood, treating stigma itself as the market inefficiency. If you’re the brand willing to name the thing, you own the conversation. The same dynamic plays out in B2B: benefits administrators and procurement teams carry their own version of the discomfort, and founders have to make the clinical and economic case to people who may never have thought carefully about these topics. 

Why It Matters Now

These conversations took place against a broader cultural and political backdrop that makes the business of women’s health more consequential than ever. Renewed waves of masculinist rhetoric risk undermining some of the equity gains achieved in the early 21st century, and discouraging founders and investors from engaging with women-focused innovation precisely when the ecosystem needs scale and confidence.

Ensuring women’s health remains visible as an economic growth driver and an innovation space is therefore a priority. Each investment, product, and policy win in this field strengthens the infrastructure that protects social and health progress itself.

A Note to First-Year MBAs

An interesting footnote from the day: a meaningful share of attendees were not HBS students at all. They came from across Boston for a student-led summit that competed with a major industry conference happening the same week and still drew a record crowd. We’re really excited about how the summit will grow in the coming years; in 2026, under the leadership of Anniqa Karmali (MBA ’27), Eliza Chomley (MBA ’27), and Courtney Sherbal (MBA ’27).

Whether you want to attend, volunteer, or simply learn more, reach out to Eliza, Courtney, or Anniqa; they would love to hear from you.

Coming Up: Fertility 101 and Egg Freezing Information Session

On the topic of women’s health closer to home: the WSA and the HCC Women's Health SIG are co-organizing a Fertility 101 and Egg Freezing information event in April. The session will cover what students actually need to know (medically, financially, and practically) about fertility preservation. Details to follow via the WSA and HCC Women’s Health SIG channels.

Thank You

This summit would not have happened without the exceptional groundwork of Christina Vosbikian (MBA ’25) and Ricky Cordoba (MBA ’25), who organized the inaugural HCC Women's Health Summit last year, and the hard work of our volunteers this year Emily Price (MBA ’26), Sylvie Stoloff (MBA ’26), and Robin Vergouwen (MPH ’26). Thank you to every speaker who gave their time, and to the 350+ people who showed up. And thank you to our sponsors J.P. Morgan, Cooley, the HBS Healthcare Initiative, Pillar VC, and In Women’s Health, whose support made this event possible.

Jane Douat (MBA ’26) is originally from Paris, France. She graduated from Télécom Paris with a degree in computer science engineering. Prior to HBS, Jane was the co-founder and CTO of Omena, a women’s health startup building a mobile app for women going through menopause.