Women’s Health: An Underinvested Opportunity
in Southeast Asia
June 2025
Women’s health has long been underestimated and underfunded. Globally, women’s health is a US$1T investment opportunity. For example, the market potential is $120-350B for menopause, and $180B-$250 for endometriosis, both greater than immunology ($180B), for cardiovascular health ($130B), and respiratory health ($90B). And, not only do women comprise just over half the population, women drive 80% of healthcare spending decisions globally.
Core women’s health investment reached a new high of $2.6B in 2024. In the past few years seven women’s health companies have emerged as unicorns: Ro Health, Myovant Sciences (acquired by Sumitovant BioPharma), Progyny, kindbody, Flo, Maven Clinic, and Let's Get Checked.
What is the opportunity to invest in Women’s Health in Southeast Asia?
Wave of Femtech Start-ups in Southeast Asia (SEA)
Femtech describes technology products, services and companies focusing on women's unique healthcare needs and preferences. Globally, the Femtech sector is predicted to reach $103 billion by 2030. As of April, 2025 there are 110 femtech startups in Southeast Asia. Singapore is anchoring the space, reflecting its maturity as both a startup and healthcare innovation hub, but growth across Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam shows promising diversification, localisation and cross-border expansion of solutions.
Many of these femtech startups are offering solutions tailored to the needs of SEA women. For example, in SEA, female health and wellness remain largely taboo and obscured: 85% of women face difficulty finding information/resources related to female health and wellness and 52% feel it’s culturally unacceptable to discuss women's health issues in public—particularly due to fear of judgment or shame. Companies that are addressing the increased demand for self-care and self-management in women’s health include Hati Health App, a Philippines-based company that offers curated wellness programs for women; Malaysia-based DMB Care, a comprehensive health and wellness app that uses AI for early detection and screening of pregnancy-related conditions and Yoona, an Indonesia-based platform that offers services designed to address social and cultural barriers to care.
Projections for SEA indicate an increase in spending among current users will add a further ~US$1.2 billion to the current femtech market, a meaningful 20% increase, without considering new users.
Femtech start-ups in the region also offer innovations with potential for global growth. Examples include two companies spun out of the National University of Singapore: FathomX that offers FxMammo, an AI Assistant that significantly improves the screening procedure for mammograms; and E3A Healthcare, which offers AI-enabled medical devices such as foetal monitors and non-invasive jaundice meters.
Understanding the Full Scope of Women’s Health
Women’s Health refers to pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, devices and healthtech companies that address women’s needs for healthcare. This includes health conditions that are unique to women, such as gynecology; affect women differently, such as cardiovascular disease, which can present differently in women; and affect women disproportionately, such as migraines which are more prevalent among women than men. Across hundreds of health conditions, only 5% are exclusive to women, leaving 95% of health conditions as an untapped frontier for breakthrough innovation and investment in the health of women.
“Women’s health is usually misunderstood as just reproductive health. But a woman’s body shape and a man’s body shape are different. Yet, when a woman goes for hip replacement surgery, she is receiving general prosthetic implants that were designed by a man, on a man and for a man – because the clinical trials were conducted on a basis of a man’s body and body shape," said healthcare industry analyst Suchismita Das of Frost and Sullivan. "There are other similar examples. In chronic conditions such as diabetes, women experience different symptoms to men,” she added, underscoring the need for diagnostics and treatments that better meet the needs of women across a wide range of health conditions.
Women across Asia are at a higher risk of certain diseases or of poorer outcomes than men, as is the case with heart disease caused by hypertension, diabetes, certain auto-immune diseases, and Alzheimer’s disease. For example, women with type 2 diabetes, including those in Asia, are almost twice as likely to die from coronary heart disease as men with type 2 diabetes. Women are less aware of their risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) as it is viewed as a man’s disease, and symptoms of a heart attack or stroke in women are not as well known as the symptoms for men. In addition, gender norms, religious and social expectations can often limit women from participating in sports and physical activities that are key to managing CVD conditions – research suggests that carving out time for such activities in place of domestic tasks can also even be viewed as self-seeking. This need for preventive care and treatment of chronic diseases that meet the specific needs of women will grow as the population demographic in SEA continues to age.
Examples of start-ups designed to meet the needs of this more holistic definition of women’s health include Thailand-based MorDee, a digital platform that offers tailored brain health and memory consultations, and Elo Care, which is developing connected and smart healthcare devices for optimized chronic and aging care with a focus on women.
Expanding Service Delivery Options
A number of trends are shifting service delivery models in the region: a shortage of healthcare workers; the increased use of technology across all aspects of healthcare; the increased demand for prevention services; and a move toward hyper-personalization of treatment. The focus is increasingly “beyond just high-cost facilities…we need to focus more on lower-cost upstream, non-acute settings and decentralized health care…There is…an opportunity for investors...to roll up, scale up, and invest in these secondary facilities, ambulatory care facilities, single specialty hospitals and clinics, going forward,” according to Dr Abhay Bangi, EY Asean Life Sciences and Health Care Leader.
Examples of start-ups in the region that are meeting women’s needs for innovative service delivery include Kindred, in the Philippines which offer a network of interconnected virtual and physical clinics focused on women’s health; and Sehati, a portable, affordable solution using the internet of medical things (IoMT) to send maternal health-related data to doctors in rural Indonesia, who can then make interpretations and recommendations.
Changes in the Investment Landscape
Investors in SEA are already seizing opportunities in women’s health. Over 70% of investors in SEA and Hong Kong femtech startups are headquartered or have a SEA regional office, with ~43% of femtech investors in these markets based in Singapore. US venture capital firms are the second largest investors, representing over 18% of femtech startup investors across SEA and Hong Kong.
High-profile incubators and accelerators have begun to view femtech as a primary investment opportunity. Examples include Y Combinator in the USA, and Antler in Singapore. Examples of their investments in the high-growth fertility market include Singapore-based companies twoplus and Zora Health respectively. Malaysia’s first femtech focused accelerator, Inno4her, sponsored by 1337 Ventures, awarded its DemoDay winners in May 2025: Dear Kyra, which offers a telehealth platform for birth control and STI testing in Malaysia and Singapore-based Magnolia Collective, which provides a digital care platform for women experiencing menopause, using AI and wearable technology.
From a valuation perspective, in Asia strategic buyers are increasingly focusing on high-tech medical sectors, involving cutting edge developments in digital health, FemTech, personalized medicine, AI-driven diagnostics, and telemedicine, where acquisitions often command higher valuations. In 2024, exit activity for digital health companies surged in Asia-Pacific, with a 5% uptick in mergers and acquisitions, underscoring the consolidation efforts across the digital health landscape. While mergers and acquisitions in femtech in SEA have been limited to date, there is no reason to believe that this region won’t likewise see higher valuations, more strategic partnerships and increased merger and acquisition activity as the femtech market matures.