Virtual healthcare that puts women’s control at the forefront is attracting VC dollars.
Every founder has an origin story. There’s one kind that may resonate with many femtech founders: interacting with a healthcare and benefits system that’s not designed to serve her at all. Often, that experience has been the catalyst to build a product that actually does.
“We’re really seeing this shift to more of women’s health as healthcare, workplace insurance, and data infrastructure.”
Laura Robinson, The51
For myStoria founder Jessica Chalk, that moment came during fertility treatments, when she was bouncing from specialist to specialist without a way to compile all her health data and keep track of different specialists.
“There were so many…moments where I wished I would have known to ask a certain question or advocate for myself in a certain way,” Chalk said of her health journey in an interview with BetaKit this spring.
After a call with her mentor, she sold her existing startup and went all-in on building a solution to help women take charge of their care. The MyStoria platform aims to put healthcare management into women’s hands by collecting health documents, symptoms, and appointment history into one place, connected via an AI context layer on top.
The Kitchener-Waterloo startup announced it had closed $1.65 million in seed funding earlier this year, led by Graphite Ventures with participation from Conexus Venture Capital, Adrenaline Fund, and Phoenix Fire Fund, to expand its app to cover fertility, painful periods, endometriosis, perimenopause, and other hormonal health conditions.
It joins a growing number of Canadian femtech startups that have closed early-stage rounds this year, driven by demand in key sectors like fertility tech and insurance coverage. Though the sub-sectors may seem disparate, tackling different parts of women’s health journeys, their resulting function is more economic participation.
Health as wealth?
Canada’s femtech companies are bucking a historical trend in a sector that has long been cast aside as too “niche” (despite it affecting half the population). Startups focused on women’s health still face barriers—like a tough early and growth-stage capital market in Canada, underfunding of women’s health research, and barriers to commercialization. Still, industry players say a change is underway.
“Femtech has for a while been this consumer category focused on fertility and reproductive health, and maybe period tracking,” The51 managing partner Lauren Robinson said. “We’re really seeing this shift to more of women’s health as healthcare, workplace insurance, and data infrastructure.”
Femtech Canada, led by Hyivy Health founder Rachel Bartholomew, reports that there were just 51 companies under the ‘femtech’ umbrella in Canada—now, there are 200. For Robinson, the economic opportunity (measured at $37 billion CAD, per a McKinsey study) is impossible to ignore. “Women’s health in our minds is economic infrastructure,” she said.
The51’s latest fund, whose first close was anchored by the Bank of Montreal and 17 individual women, is indexed on the connection between women’s health, wealth, and work. Underinvestment and a lack of attention to women’s health still limit full participation in the workforce, even though it may not be visible. For example, three-quarters of women experience menopause symptoms that interfere with daily life, 90 percent of women feel stress at work because of their periods, and nearly a quarter of women experience post-partum depression.
“Some of the data, insight, and technology can unlock better outcomes,” Robinson argued. “When you think about expanding women’s participation in the workforce, you need health. It’s at the core of really everything.”
The benefits piece
Data from World Economic Forum report on women’s health investment outlined areas with future growth potential, many of which are seeing an uptick in Canada. Women-first longevity and wellness concierge services, such as lifestyle care for hormonal changes related to menopause, are one. So is telehealth and benefits management: women account for nearly three-quarters of all virtual healthcare users, while menopause and fertility issues are chronically underserved by traditional healthcare models.
Those gaps are reflected in startups like Montréal’s Coral and Toronto’s June Health—both of which sell platform access to employers. Coral, which connects patients with virtual care for menopause symptoms and other health conditions, raised another $4 million CAD in March, a year after launch, and reported encouraging platform numbers: more than 70 percent of users said they saw an important reduction in perimenopause and menopause symptoms within 90 days of using Coral, the company said.
June Health, which closed $2.4 million in funding last month, has made workplace benefits its entire business model, landing an investor-client in insurance company Securian Canada and trying to demystify coverage for users. Since launching last year, June CEO Lori Casselman said the platform has expanded to meet demand for access to mental health support, fertility treatments, parenting coaching, and weight management options (such as GLP-1s, where “clinically appropriate”).
More visibility into hormones is another way Canadian companies are looking to sell women (as well as men and gender-diverse folks) more control over their health. Montréal’s Eli Health launched real-time saliva tests to monitor hormones including progesterone and testosterone, which are associated with metabolism, fertility, and other health outcomes. Another player is Science&Humans, which closed $10 million CAD in January for its hormone monitoring and treatment platform.
Owning your timeline
There’s also been a boom of interest in fertility technology in Canada, which covers everything from in vitro fertilization treatments to egg-freezing. Toronto Life described it as the “white-hot fertility market,” which is plagued with issues for patients and a lack of standards across clinics, as well as characterized by startups looking to innovate in a growing space.
Calgary-based Flora Fertility is combining the growing interest in fertility tech with benefits coverage. The startup has developed unique insurance underwriting models for fertility treatments, where the plan is individually owned instead of tied to an employer. That means women with years-long fertility journeys can transfer that coverage across jobs.
According to the co-founders, insuring fertility treatments in Canada is yet another underserved opportunity due to a lack of attention to women’s health. Fewer than two percent of IVF and fertility treatment patients can afford care out of pocket, but it’s not traditionally structured into workplace benefit plans—and employers willing to offer that coverage tend to be larger.
“You’ll see women staying in jobs that they don’t necessarily want to be staying in, in order to maintain that coverage,” Flora co-founder Dr. Christy Lane told BetaKit.
For Dr. Lane and her co-founder, giving women flexibility over their family planning and their careers was key. It offers individual fertility insurance plans and allows employers to sponsor them—no golden handcuffs. The startup raised a $5-million CAD seed round in April, preceded by $500,000 from BDC Capital in the fall. It had a successful trial in the US and is now targeting market expansion in Canada.
Flora’s model connects to the idea of autonomy over healthcare, and how that might, in 2026, still somehow be a market gap. “We’re really trying to enable accessibility and affordability for women, and the ability to own your own timeline and your reproductive health.”
Feature image courtesy myStoria.