In the latest episode, Marcia welcomes guest Brittany Barreto, an expert in femtech and founder of FemHealth Insights, to discuss how femtech is revolutionizing women's health and empowering female founders to create solutions for a trillion-dollar market. Brittany Barreto is a scientist by training and a passionate advocate for women's health. With her background in molecular and human genetics, she shares her journey from being a nerdy geneticist to a successful entrepreneur in the femtech industry. Brittany's first startup was the world's first DNA-based dating app. Now focusing on the broader femtech industry, Brittany discusses the importance of addressing the unique health needs of women and the tremendous potential for innovation in this underserved industry. This episode dives deep into the challenges and opportunities in femtech, highlighting the need for innovative solutions that go beyond "me too" products. Brittany emphasizes the importance of investing in first-ever products that address critical women's health issues like endometriosis and improving the patient experience in areas such as pelvic floor health. She also shares valuable insights into the femtech market, including the growth of the industry, potential exit opportunities, and the necessity of considering sex and gender in scientific research and product design. Whether you're an investor, a startup founder, or simply interested in the future of women's health, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to tap into the trillion-dollar potential of femtech.
In the latest episode, Marcia welcomes guest Brittany Barreto, an expert in femtech and founder of FemHealth Insights, to discuss how femtech is revolutionizing women's health and empowering female founders to create solutions for a trillion-dollar market. Brittany Barreto is a scientist by training and a passionate advocate for women's health. With her background in molecular and human genetics, she shares her journey from being a nerdy geneticist to a successful entrepreneur in the femtech industry.
Brittany's first startup was the world's first DNA-based dating app. Now focusing on the broader femtech industry, Brittany discusses the importance of addressing the unique health needs of women and the tremendous potential for innovation in this underserved industry. This episode dives deep into the challenges and opportunities in femtech, highlighting the need for innovative solutions that go beyond "me too" products.
Brittany emphasizes the importance of investing in first-ever products that address critical women's health issues like endometriosis and improving the patient experience in areas such as pelvic floor health. She also shares valuable insights into the femtech market, including the growth of the industry, potential exit opportunities, and the necessity of considering sex and gender in scientific research and product design. Whether you're an investor, a startup founder, or simply interested in the future of women's health, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to tap into the trillion-dollar potential of femtech.
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Marcia Dawood
Well, hi, Brittany. Welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here today.
Brittany Barreto
So excited to be on.
Marcia Dawood
Well, you are, like, the OG when it comes to femtech, and you have been at the forefront of, like, everything from data. You have a PhD in human genetics. I mean, just amazing things that you've done, and you're still so incredibly young. So please tell us a little bit about how you came about on this journey and how you've accomplished so much so fast.
Brittany Barreto
Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm a scientist by training, so PhD in molecular and human genetics, which is a mouthful, just means that I'm very nerdy and I love DNA. And then while being a nerdy geneticist, though, realized I had too much personality to work in a laboratory my whole life. No one got my jokes, if you will. And I was in the career office kind of looking at what were alternative industries that a PhD could pursue. And I went to a pitch competition, actually, is what it was that really captured my heart. And I saw scientists and doctors and business folks on stage essentially pitching a dream, pitching something kind of crazy, kind of off the wall. But if it works, things would change dramatically for patients or consumers or healthcare systems.
Brittany Barreto
And I just got the bug, and I actually had an idea, crazy idea, as most startups are for a DNA based dating app, and I pursued it. So my first company in grad school was called Faramore, and Faramore was the world's first DNA based dating app. And I fundraised about $1.2 million from Angels and built and scaled that company. Unfortunately, it did close. Kind of one of those unpredictable events. Apple changed their policy around who can ask for DNA in the App Store, and dating became prohibited from asking for your genetic information. We could do a whole podcast on that, but we'll just say that I'm a real entrepreneur because I close my company, and I think your listeners may appreciate this. I was a first time female founder, and I actually wrote, like, apology handwritten notes to all my investors with, like, 5% of the original investment back in a check to them because we had a few thousand dollars left.
Brittany Barreto
I know later on, I heard founders just take the remaining money and go to Hawaii or something. I'm like, Wait, you could do that? That's not what I did. I wrote, like, apology notes about how it didn't work out the way we thought, and I appreciated their belief in me, and I'll try again. One so, yeah, there's that. And then I got recruited to work in venture capital, so I learned about how investment works from the VC side, and that's when I came across some startups working in women's health, and we call that femtech. So Femtech is innovation in women's health and wellness. And I became obsessed with them. I thought what they were working on was the most important things I've ever heard of.
Brittany Barreto
They were either making the first ever of something that, in my opinion, should have already existed, like an ovarian cancer diagnostic, or they were innovating on something that was last created and modified 200 years ago, like the speculum. And so I became wildly obsessed, said, this is so impactful, so purposeful, this is what I want to work on. And I went to get a job at a femtech fund because that seemed like the next logical step. And there was only one in the world that I could find. And I thought, well, that's strange. And then I couldn't find any accelerators. I couldn't find any market research reports. I couldn't even find a list of femtech companies on PitchBook.
Brittany Barreto
I said, what the heck is happening? And that's when I realized this was 2019, that that's how underserved the industry was, that we lacked basic infrastructure and ecosystem around women's, health, innovation. And that's what I've dedicated the last four years of my life to.
Marcia Dawood
That is amazing. And I know I've heard you say before that women are not little men. So tell us a little bit more about all of the things that really need to happen and where we are like today, where we were maybe 510 years ago, and then how far we really have to come.
Brittany Barreto
Yeah, sure. So essentially what happened was that medicine and science assumed that women were small men and that if a drug or device worked in a male patient, well, surely it will work in a female patient. And so the backdrop to science is actually based on a male paradigm. And what I mean by that is 75% of the cell lines we use in scientific research are male cells. So they have an x and y chromosome. So we actually might be missing drugs that could work in females, but just don't work in male cells. But again, if we're using this paradigm that women are small men, there's this assumption that these male cell lines would be as good as a female cell line. You jump forward into animal models.
Brittany Barreto
95% of animal models are male only. They are curing uterine organ disorders in male mice. They are literally implanting uteruses into male mice and trying to cure disease in them.
Marcia Dawood
Versus a crazy.
Brittany Barreto
Yeah, it's really kind of mind blowing when you think about it. And back in the day, the reason was because, well, you have all these additional factors and variables to take into consideration with female mice. They have a menstrual cycle. They get pregnant, they breastfeed, right? But when we live in a world where we have chat GPT, and we're flying drones on Mars and landing rockets on asteroids, we can probably accommodate a menstrual cycle. And so these are old excuses that are no longer acceptable. You fast forward into clinical trials. We luckily now have female participation in clinical trials. In fact, females were banned from clinical trials prior to 1993, we got the permission to be enrolled.
Brittany Barreto
It wasn't until 2016 that we were required to participate, by the way. And so we do, luckily have female participation in clinical trials, but we are still dosing female and male patients the same way. And if you look at drugs like Ambien females, we know that females do not metabolize Ambien as fast as males do. And so when you have a drug that causes things like car accidents in the morning, we need to accommodate sex specific dosages. And so where we're at today is that we're finally starting to realize that sex and gender are variables that we really need to accommodate in product design, healthcare, innovation, pharmaceutical development. And the future is that this is standard. Unfortunately, right now it's very forward thinking of people to consider sex and gender in their scientific experiment or in their product design, but I hope a future that constantly includes this.
Marcia Dawood
Absolutely. And so as angel investors, as we are evaluating companies and looking to see what we think is going to be scalable, it's going to be something that we can really see change happening for women's health. What are some of the things that you think we need to be on the lookout for?
Brittany Barreto
Well, first we need to be on the lookout for I would say that kind of going back to how I originally got involved in femtech. And what I'm really excited about is there is unfortunately, a lot of also gosh, let me back up because what am I trying to say here? Okay, I'm going to back up and redo this answer. The thing that angels should really be looking for is, like I said before, is the first evers of products or things that are being innovated on that have never, ever been innovated on before. Unfortunately, in femtech, you do see a lot of me too products. So essentially another digital health app to track your period or another app to track your fertility, or another at home fertility test. And those are absolutely awesome products and there's going to be a lot of opportunity there. But I know personally, and my recommendation to the angels listening to this episode is start to ask, well, is this actually the first ever of something? So there's now a few companies working on the first ever diagnostic for endometriosis, which affects one in ten women. If you're looking for something that has a huge product market, that market opportunity is enormous.
Brittany Barreto
What you're innovating on, the current standard of care for diagnosing endometriosis is surgery. That is a huge leap forward in terms of innovation when you can say you no longer have to have exploratory laparoscopic surgery. Instead, you can actually submit a used tampon. And we have a screening tool that will tell us what your chances are that you're expressing proteins that we know are higher in women with endometriosis. That's the kind of stuff I'm really excited about, or for another example, is the tenaculum. The tenaculum is these little metal pinchers that clamp onto the cervix. When you're having an IUD inserted, it is incredibly painful. Very, very painful.
Brittany Barreto
And it's not even the procedure itself that's painful. The IUD being inserted, it's the clamping down of the cervix with this barbaric tool. And there are medical device companies now using things such as suction. Essentially, it's like a little hickey on the cervix versus a clamp that's stabilizing it. And those are the types of innovations I'm really excited about. It dramatically improves the experience of the patient. And so that's what I would look out for. Is this something that is there already 50 of these apps in the App Store or a full aisle of these products at my local Target? Or is this something that is truly moving the needle on women's health?
Marcia Dawood
I love all these stories. They're so interesting to hear about the ways that we can innovate that are really big and they do hit a big market sometimes, I think people think, oh, well, if it was something it was only so many women, then that's not enough. But no, these are really big problems that are going to affect a lot of people.
Brittany Barreto
I mean, we're talking about things like menstruation. We're talking about things like menopause, right? Menopause. If you live long enough as a female, you will become menopausal. Right. These are not orphan diseases. These are everyday experiences of females.
Marcia Dawood
Yes. I wish a lot of people would be working, and I know that a lot of people are working on menopause. So tell us a little bit about the data that you've been working on and how you've been evolving that.
Brittany Barreto
Well, because I'm a previous founder, I'm also a previous VC. I knew that when I pitched to investors or when I was doing due diligence on a deal, having data was really critical to making that decision on which investor was going to invest in me or which deal we were going to be investing in in. And when I got into Women's Health, my God, we were still saying that Women's Health was worth $50,000,000,000.50. Well, you know what, I did a quick Google search. You know what the menstrual pad market value is alone? It's 37 billion. And I just could not help myself but ask. I think women are probably worth $14 billion more than menstrual pads. And so we did kind of a quick back of the napkin, and I'll admit it, we just took what was already done in the market in terms of what was the market size for fertility, what's the market size for breast cancer, what's the market size, et cetera.
Brittany Barreto
Put those numbers together and it was a $1.1 trillion market. Now, that's a number that you can encourage investors to get involved in, right? And so we did things like publish the market size. We also maintained the largest database of Femtech companies and exits. So the companies part is really important because you can start to then visualize where's the things that are concentrated so, for example, maternal health, fertility, and menstruation are the most concentrated areas in women's health. And where are the things that really need help on pelvic floor health? Menopause mental health for women, like postpartum depression, huge, huge opportunities. And it's been really exciting to track this data for about three years now, because we actually do see trends. One of the things we saw in 2020, when I originally started this database, was very few pelvic floor health companies. And now we see this as a huge, booming industry.
Brittany Barreto
There must be 35 companies around the world working on this. So really awesome growth there. So you can start to see trends really important for making investment decisions. Or if you want to start a company, right, stop making another organic cotton tampon company. There's already 20, right? But now we have the data to empower predominantly female founders to not waste their life savings on something that actually already exists, but no one was reporting on it. And then I'll also just mention quickly the exits. So investors, they're not donating. You know that I know that, right.
Brittany Barreto
They want their money back. And so when you can have a record of here's how much money people have made by putting their money into women's health, you make a much stronger case for investment into the industry. You can show, wow, Femtech companies are actually exiting faster than your average tech company. And that's true. We published last year that the average exit of Femtech is four to six years versus eight to ten. And the reason for that, it's a little sad, but exciting for investors. The sad part is that pharma is allocating less than 4% of their R D budget to women's health. If you take cancer out, it's less than 1%.
Brittany Barreto
And what does that mean? It means that they're focused on acquiring. They're not doing research for solutions to create their own. They wait on the sidelines. And most of the femtech companies, if they do have, let's say, clinical trials or any kind of regulatory they're getting gobbled up, exited, and purchased in their phase one, just prove it's safe, and the farmers are taking it over. So you're in Femtech, not even looking at fundraising. Five to six rounds of funding. You may only need two to three before you're acquired. And that's the kind of stories that I get really excited about.
Brittany Barreto
And when I give talks at conferences, you can see other investors eyes kind of light up. It's like, you don't necessarily have to care about uterine fibroids. You can just care about money. That's fine. And by the way, Femtech will make you a ton of it.
Marcia Dawood
Oh, that's awesome. And so how does your database work? Is it kind of like PitchBook for a subscription? Or how do people get access?
Brittany Barreto
Yeah, exactly. So on our website, Femhealthinsights.com, you can access our database. We have a corporate pricing tier, and we also have an innovators pricing tier for students and nonprofits and startups. The reason why we have the two prices, because startups need this data for their Pitch decks too. And I am pro founder through and through. And so we have a decreased price for them to access the database compared to our corporate clients. But it's still a hell of a lot less than PitchBook, I'll tell you that. And we're able to filter our data based on product types.
Brittany Barreto
So let's say you're interested in digital health. You can filter our database of 1700 Femtech companies. It's updated weekly, so it's constantly dynamically changing. You can filter for digital health, or let's say you're interested in, wow, Pelvic Floor Health grew. I want to know more about that. You can look up based on Health vertical for Pelvic Floor Health, or maybe you're based in Canada. You're just interested in Canadian companies. You can filter based on country.
Brittany Barreto
So it is similar to PitchBook in those types of ways. One way it's different is that we track companies on average two years earlier than PitchBook does, because we have a virtual community and accelerator DIY accelerator for startups. So we have people joining our community at the idea stage. So we're really able to capture them and we put them in the database as soon as they have a URL and they have a company name. So those are some of the differences. We also offer consulting and research services. So on the back end, our database, we have 300 columns of data per company in our public.
Marcia Dawood
I just lost you, Brittany. Something happened. I lost you. I lost oh, there you are. You just started to say a public company and then it cut.
Brittany Barreto
Okay, I'm so sorry.
Marcia Dawood
No worries, no worries at all.
Brittany Barreto
You can hear me now?
Marcia Dawood
Yes.
Brittany Barreto
Okay, what was the last thing I said?
Marcia Dawood
You said something about and the public companies and then it got cut off.
Brittany Barreto
Hmm. Know what I was saying about public companies?
Marcia Dawood
Doesn't matter. So let's just up with where people can find oh, how about this? Why don't we start with so what is the future now of this database? Where would you like to see it in three to five years?
Brittany Barreto
Yeah, we would like to see our database continue to grow as the Femtech industry does. We've seen 60% of women's health companies have been founded in the last five years, so huge growth every year. We're adding probably about at this .2 hundred companies per year. I started with a 100 company database back in 2020. So just huge growth. And I hope that we can continue to expand it. I mean, honestly, one day I hope that it is gobbled up and acquired by a larger market intelligence platform so we can have even more power behind the research that we do, but we're always looking to support clients as well with research services. So we have a lot of back end data that we don't present on the subscription version, such as total investment, diversity of the leadership.
Brittany Barreto
And so we actually provide that data to clients through our consulting services as well.
Marcia Dawood
That's amazing. And so if our listeners here at the angel next Door don't know you have a podcast called Femtech Focus, which is awesome, and I love all the episodes, but my absolute favorite episodes are when you do the year end wrap up. So I'm guessing that you're gathering some nuggets so that you can do that at the end of 2020 03:00 a.m.
Brittany Barreto
I right. You are right. Today is November 22 and I just put on my to do list, like start thinking about end of year podcast because it really is the most popular one. Actually, it dramatically is outlisned by all the other episodes. We have 230 episodes to date, but every year I do my end of year review and people love that one.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I think even last year it was long too. It was like an hour and a half and I was like, I couldn't get enough. And I think your dog was in the middle of something.
Brittany Barreto
They always join so good.
Marcia Dawood
Oh, everybody has to listen to that. So any other things that you'd like our listeners to know about? Femtech? Things that some nuggets that they can walk away with?
Brittany Barreto
Just that. If you ever hear someone say that women's health is niche, kindly let them know that that's incorrect and you can point them to resources such as the Femtech Focus podcast, femme Health Insights website. We do have annual landscape reports that we put out, so we have two on our website now we're working on this year's, which will be published in February of next year, that really shows the data. It's not my opinion, it's not anyone's opinion. It's data that's proving that women's health is not niche. Moreover, if you hear somebody or even think it yourself, I invite you to adjust your thinking. That I hear a lot of investors say, oh, well, I've made my women's health investment. And to me that sounds like this equivalent to I've made my internet based investment.
Brittany Barreto
This is not an industry. That's one and done. If you say, oh, I've already made an investment in menopause and you're talking to a menopause deal, okay, fair enough. But having one women's health deal in your portfolio, you're really still continuing to miss out. And if you want to know more about what other verticals are really hot right now in women's health, again, check out the podcast, read our reports, go to our website because this is not a box that we should be checking because again, the return investment numbers speak for themselves. You're going to be successful on a bigger scale and faster if you put money into women's health.
Marcia Dawood
Amazing. Well, Brittany, as usual, you are a wealth of knowledge, and I really appreciate you coming on the show and telling our listeners more about everything. Femtech so thanks for being here.
Brittany Barreto
Thanks for having me.