FemTech Is Not a Trend, It Is a Clinical Correction

with Roswitha Verwer and Dr. Muskaan Bhan

For most of modern medical history, women were considered an inconvenience to research.

Not because their diseases were rare. Not because their needs were unclear. But their biology did not fit neatly into simplified trial designs.

Hormonal cycles were labeled as variability.
Pregnancy was labeled risk.
Menstrual health was labeled complexity.

So women were excluded.

This exclusion did not just shape clinical trials.
It shaped drug development, diagnostics, dosing guidelines, and even artificial intelligence models now entering healthcare.

When we discuss femtech today, we often characterize it as a fast-growing sector, a consumer category, or a social movement. That framing misses the real point.

FemTech is not a trend.It is a correction.

A correction to decades of incomplete data.
A correction to biased clinical systems.
A correction to investment models optimized for speed rather than responsibility.

That is why this conversation with Roswitha Verwer, Founder and CEO of “YON E”, and Muskaan Bhan, Chief Clinical Officer, matters.

Not because it is inspirational.
But because it is operational.

From Concept to Prototype, Why Execution Matters More Than Vision

In early-stage healthcare, ambition is cheap.
Execution is rare.

“YON E” did not start with a fundraising pitch deck. It started with a clinical question that had never been answered properly.

What happens when you measure female biomarkers continuously, not once a year, not at a single appointment, but daily, across life stages?

This is not a software problem.
It is a systems problem.

Muskaan described how the company progressed from TRL 2 to TRL 4, moving from laboratory validation to prototype development ahead of schedule. Not by cutting corners, but by planning ten steps ahead.

This is what disciplined startups do differently.

They do not react to problems.
They prepare for them.

They build Plans A through Z before Plan A fails.
They treat roadmap reviews as living processes, not static slides.

In healthcare, speed without structure is not innovation.
It is a risk.

The Data Gap No One Wants to Talk About

One of the most uncomfortable truths in modern healthcare is this.

We do not lack data.
We lack the right data.

Muskaan shared a statistic that should unsettle anyone investing in healthcare AI.

Out of nearly 700 FDA-cleared AI medical devices, only 3.6 percent included race or ethnicity data.
None included female stratified data.

None.

This means that many of the tools we now celebrate as intelligent are trained on incomplete representations of humanity.

Women are not smaller men.
Children are not small adults.
Pregnant bodies are not edge cases.

Yet we still design systems as if they were.

The result is not just biased outputs.
It is misinformed care.

FemTech challenges this by necessity. Because once you begin measuring continuous biomarkers like pH and temperature across menstrual cycles, fertility windows, and life stages, you cannot hide behind averages.

You are forced to confront biological reality.

Why Continuous Measurement Changes Everything

Modern medicine is still built around snapshots.

One blood draw.
One appointment.
One annual checkup.

These snapshots are treated as the truth.

They are not.

They are moments.

Physiology is dynamic. Hormones shift daily. Immune responses fluctuate. Stress, sleep, and the environment constantly affect outcomes.

As I shared in the conversation, a single measurement is not a status. It is a timestamp.

Continuous data is not a luxury.
It is the future of precision medicine.

This is where YON E’s approach becomes strategically important, not just clinically interesting.

By measuring continuously, you stop guessing.
You start understanding patterns.

Patterns are what pharmaceutical development, diagnostics, and preventative care actually need.

Values Versus Shortcuts, The Investor Question

One of the most revealing moments in this conversation came when Roswitha described an early investor suggestion.

Skip clinical studies.
Launch as a wellness device.
Sell first.
Validate later.

This is not unusual advice.

It is also why many healthcare products fail over the long term.

Shortcuts may improve short-term revenue.
They destroy long-term trust.

Healthcare is not an app category.
You do not get to “move fast and break things” when human bodies are involved.

“YON E” rejected this path. Not because it was slower, but because it violated their responsibility.

As an investor, this matters.

I have seen too many companies optimize for optics instead of outcomes. They raise money quickly, launch prematurely, and collapse under regulatory or data scrutiny.

Return on investment is meaningless without return on impact.

The two are not opposites.
They are sequential.

Why FemTech Struggles With Capital

Despite clear progress in science, femtech still struggles to attract capital at scale.

The reasons are not mysterious.

Longer timelines.
Higher regulatory demands.
Complex biology.
Underrepresented decision makers.

Many investors still ask the wrong first question. “Is this really a problem?”

The answer is yes.
It always was.

But if you have never experienced it, you may not recognize it.

This is where execution focused investment models matter.

I do not believe in passive capital.
I believe in partnership.

Our approach is not to fund and wait. It is to co-build, de-risk, and execute together.

This is particularly important in femtech, where founders are often forced to outperform simply to be taken seriously.

The Shift Is Real, But Incomplete

There is progress.

Dedicated femtech tracks at major conferences.
Government funding initiatives.
Specialized hospital units focused on women’s health.
A growing founder community that shares knowledge instead of guarding it.

These are meaningful signals.

But finance still lags behind science.

Professionalism is advancing faster than capital allocation.

That gap will close.
It always does.

The question is who has the patience and discipline to stay through the build phase.

Why This Conversation Matters

This episode is not about promoting a company.

It is about exposing a structural flaw in healthcare and showing what responsible correction looks like.

FemTech is not about pink branding or niche products.
It is about rebuilding clinical foundations with better data, better systems, and better accountability.

That is not a trend.
That is overdue.

Timecode:

00:00 Welcome and Introduction

00:50 Progress and Achievements in FemTech

02:16 Strategic Planning and Teamwork

05:18 Challenges in FemTech and AI Development

08:42 Importance of Continuous Data Tracking

12:49 Ethical Considerations and Long-Term Goals

16:20 FemTech Industry Trends and Future Outlook

20:29 Navigating Advisory Roles in a Regulated Era

20:48 The Rise of FemTech and Female Health Initiatives

22:38 Building a Supportive FemTech Community

23:19 Challenges in FemTech Investment

24:34 Investor Conversations and Strategies

30:21 The Importance of Team and Personal Connections

33:08 Future Plans and Closing Remarks

Links:

Peter M. Kovacs LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermkovacs/

Peter M. Kovacs Personal Website:https://www.petermkovacs.com/

PMK Group Website: https://www.pmk-group.com/

Guests:

Roswitha Verwer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roswitha-verwer-b2b636137/

Roswitha Verwer Personal Website: https://www.roswithaverwer.com/

Muskaan Bhan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-muskaan-bhan-9b7123120/

Transcript:

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: So very nice to meet you again, Roswitha and Muskaan, and very happy to welcome you here again. Last time we talked about the basics of YON E and also the femtech industry. I'm just wondering how you see, after these couple of months, you progressed a lot in your field and you were involved in many different events. In this entire femtech ecosystem, you are a very good and important player.

How do you see this femtech environment? How is it progressing? Once by once and year by year because it started at a very low level, unfortunately, and you are one of the pioneers. You try to change this environment. And I'm really hoping I'm supporting you on this journey. I'm just wondering where you are now.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: Yes. Thank you so much, Peter, for having us here again. Since the last time we met and spoke about what we were starting to do, we're quite ahead in our journey now. We've managed to accelerate from the TRL 2, which was just proving the validation of the concept in the lab, to now moving on to building our first prototype, and we hope to do that successfully by Q2 next year. We're well on our journey to make that happen.

I think just looking at the current space and the current trends in femtech in general, I feel like our device will be revolutionary in the kind of data and the kind of biomarkers we are tracking. It's so important, not just for the aspect that we're doing a daily tracking method, but also the overall data we can get out of it and then tag that data to the life stage of women, because that's extremely important to have any sort of application within women's health. We've managed to now begin the TRL 4 phase, which we will move on to do some more biocompatibility testing and build our outer housings and integrate the sensor into all of that and have a prototype hopefully very soon in our hands. Maybe in the next podcast, we'll have a prototype with us.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: But it's very nice progress and as I know it, it's much ahead of your initial planning, which is quite rare that you progress much faster nowadays than expected.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: I think it's all about the strategic planning as well. Because we made sure to have all our plans structured in a way that we're not only meeting the milestones but also excelling, keeping the due diligence on par with the quality we're trying to achieve. Because of the team we have, we're incredibly lucky with all of the talented people we work with and we've managed to also find amazing partners that we work with, even the manufacturing partners or lab partners.

Roswitha Verwer: I also think what is important for a startup is that you can act fast. Obviously, you make a roadmap, you make a planning and goals and KPIs for different quarters, but it's not always aligned with partners because they of course have their own planning and partnerships portfolio as well.

So what is important and what we do a lot is consistently analyzing the roadmap: where we can accelerate and what to do when something is delayed from external factors. We are consistently aware of how we can have a strong roadmap and KPIs, but also adjust fast when needed. I think that's a skill you need to have in a startup environment to act fast, make quick decisions, and always keep aligned with the highest intention of the company. It's something we did a lot.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: And it's also about staying ten steps ahead. So we've got plans A to Z already prepared. We're ready if something goes wrong; we know what the next step is and we mitigate it as soon as we foresee it coming. I think that's extremely important because we know how high-risk we are right now, and we know that every single tiny decision we make has a huge impact on real human lives. So we take our responsibility very seriously, and we hope that we can excel at the coming phases and achieve all the milestones that we're set to achieve.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: Okay. So mainly it is the success recipe that you're very well prepared for all the scenarios and also the teamwork, as I learned from you.

Roswitha Verwer: Yeah, absolutely. I think what is on our side, obviously, is I like to be prepared a lot. I know a lot of companies do the Q1 planning in January; we already have that done. We already know exactly what we're going to do in Q1 and Q2, because I feel like when you start with that in January, it's a bit slower.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: It's too late already.

Roswitha Verwer: Exactly. So we really do everything way ahead because then we have enough time to mitigate those risks. And we have a really good relationship internally with our communication. Whatever is going on, I can immediately call our CFO from Boston, our legal counsel in Spain, or you from London. We are really hands-on as a team and I think that's also rare; I'm really lucky to have that level and relationship of communication.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: And what are the main problems and challenges you are suffering as a femtech company and as a female leader?

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: I think they vary. Obviously, one of the most recent challenges we've been facing is trying to raise investment. Apart from that, in terms of the medical side of things, we're in the process of also developing our own AI software for our companion app. The challenge I foresee right now with that is creating the exact framework to train this large language model, as all of the data out there is only male-referenced. There is no sex stratification in that data.

We are trying to be very meticulous about the kind of data we use to train our model because we want to make sure it's representative. It's also considering people's ethnicities and lots of different other factors. Because the biomarkers we are trying to measure on a daily basis haven't been measured before, we want to tag every single data set to the life stage of a woman. That's the overall view of how you treat a woman. Historically, because women were considered complex, they were just put out of every single clinical trial. That's what we're trying to change within “YON E”. We're trying really hard to find ways to make that data more sex-stratified and more inclusive. I feel like this is also a systemic problem in general. When you go to a GP, they don't really ask you these life questions about what your menstrual cycle is or how your period pain is. So I think the change needs to be really in a more systemic way.

Recently I read a study of almost 700 FDA-cleared AI medical devices. Can you just take a wild guess what percentage of these there were 692 medical devices what percentage of these devices had the data points for race or ethnicity?

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: 20%.

Roswitha Verwer: I wanted to say 20 as well.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: 3.6%.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: 3.6.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: And these are FDA-cleared devices. Guess how many of these actually considered female-stratified information to train this large language model?

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: Zero.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: Absolutely none. So those are startling figures that we are trying to change as a company, and that's why it's so important for us to take all of these aspects into consideration while we build our device. We're trying to include this bias of not having just male-referenced information and try and make sure that we're referencing actual human female experiences because it's so different across your whole lifespan. We're taking a more lifecycle approach rather than just a point-of-care approach in terms of how we train our data and how we set the benchmarks for our device.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: I think the most important thing I just recently learned about this AI in healthcare environment is that it is most important not to just get the "screenshot." The main problem with current healthcare is that we make a blood sampling and we think that it is our current status. No, it is the current status at that moment. Half a day later or the next day, it's different. Tracking the data continuously is the future. That's why this kind of device you're developing is becoming more and more critical, because this one screenshot per year is not enough. I am very happy that you are developing something which is moving toward the future of healthcare and patient care. It's very important for me to see how you change this paradigm with this old paradigm which doesn't really work well, because it's biased. Completely biased.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: Yeah. Completely biased.

Roswitha Verwer: I think it's beautiful how we, on one hand, are changing healthcare environments and also simultaneously implementing the new wave and new trends. That also comes with a lot of risk that you need to think about as a company to mitigate. I'm happy that we are consistently talking about how to do that and how to think about the future. I also understand that there needs to be certain policies for companies; for example, with the example that you just shared it's ridiculous. And that definitely needs to change. Talking about this and bringing awareness to it is already a start of the change, because I wasn't even aware, to be honest.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: Yeah. I'm also very happy to be part of it. Also, I think there is quite a similarity with pediatric treatment. Most of the medications are not tested by pediatrics. Kids are not small adults; they're completely different. I think it's the same similarity here.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: Yeah. Historically with women, even with the pharmacokinetics of the half-life of drugs, they've just considered women to be just smaller men because we have less muscle mass. Even pregnant women are devoid of being a part of any clinical trial, but they still use things like paracetamol during pregnancy, and we have no idea how those impact the human body while the woman is pregnant. So yeah, this is the main challenge basically this data doesn't exist. We're trying really hard to create our clinical study design around those inclusion criteria where we can make sure that we are including all of these different factors and making sure that we have all these variables in place to make much more informed decisions and actually help women. It's not just about money and the optics.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: But it's very important just finding the variables to measure, but also the continuous measurement as we just discussed.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: And the enough length of time, at least over a period, just to be sure that you are tracking all the variables in all the different scenarios. You will get the full picture and nobody takes the time, energy, and money to see these full pictures. I think everybody's just going forward in a blind way. If they're lucky, they find it by chance, but the proper way is what you are doing to make the proper measurements.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: And maybe that's just that they're taking the easiest route to market and trying to see what's the best, easiest, fastest route to get that return on investment. But that's not how real healthcare was set out to impact people. We're working on "Return on Impact" (ROI), and that's why we're so focused on taking those variables and doing that continuous data collection. It is not easy, but we are trying our best.

Roswitha Verwer: It's actually interesting because at the beginning of last year, I was in contact with certain investors. I was well aware that building a medical device is going to take a long time and it's high risk, especially in a field that's never been done before. One investor mentioned: "Why not just launch your product as a wellness device in the US? Don't do any studies. Don't focus on the patent. Just start selling the device and let the audience pay for it."

But we don't even have a device yet! That goes against all our values. It's interesting to see that in many cases, it's not values first and money after. But values are really one of our core values. We know the responsibility and how long it takes, so it's so important that we carry out our big goals. We cannot cut any corners along the way to get higher revenue or profit. We need to make sure that we do the right studies and do it correctly with the ethnicities that need to be included. It's interesting to even hear this conversation where someone says, "Oh, just do it like that. Just forget about all the studies and start selling it as a device." No, thank you. Let's end this conversation right now.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: We also do believe that you will get your return on investment and the revenue if you do things properly in a transparent way including your target audience in your decision-making. That's what we try and do even with our current research. Because you are building for them, you need to have them on the table with you making those decisions, or at least aligning with you on what the need actually is. If you get that part right, you automatically have that return on investment.

Roswitha Verwer: Even with our B2C app, which is in the final stage one of the key factors we are focusing on is making the data policies and legal requirements accessible and digestible for the audience. Many times users just click on something because it's too long and they don't know what it means. We do that not only from a legal side but also for the reports that result from using our device. There is a report for the healthcare provider that is in medical language, but for the user, it's broken down into simple terms. So the user is empowered to go into this conversation. Many times women don't feel empowered to ask the right questions because it's hard to know what to ask. We make sure both the user and healthcare provider have the right information to utilize the data that we are measuring.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: Yeah, it's very important. And what you are talking about, I think it's also part of the entire femtech industry how you make the standards on a higher level that everybody should follow. Do you see any positive changes in this arena?

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: A couple of months ago I attended one of the biggest women's health conferences in the world, hosted in the UK. I got to meet so many talented people working in femtech and medtech building medical devices for women at every stage of life. I was obviously very relieved to learn that there was nobody who was doing what we were doing, which was a great thing for us. Another thing was the level of detail people are going into. For example, somebody was building something for breast milk; somebody had a product to improve fertility using enzymes.

These are really complex solutions. What we're doing is also super complex in terms of the data and the biomarkers. The relation between the pH and the temperature and how that impacts fertility this is data that is yet to be found. As we all know, data is king. This data can be used in tremendously amazing ways within pharma, biotech, and research. There are loads of femtech startups out there now. We recently spoke about how lots of femtech startups die within the first five years. I think the rate for femtech was higher compared to overall startups, and we were wondering if it's the lack of investment. Founders can't really just bootstrap the whole process because clinical trials and building devices or AI is quite expensive.

Roswitha Verwer: I think, to be honest, it's either investment or people. If you have the right investments, then the next potential issue could be finding the right people to deliver. You need to hire key individuals that have a price tag, and if they don't deliver what they promise or there are not enough protocols in place, then that's another risk because you lose a lot of money.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: But do you see some positive improvement? There are more and more femtech companies and events. I see separate sections in big conferences for female leaders as well.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: Definitely. From the last five to seven years since I was introduced to femtech as a specialty, there have been drastic changes. The initial advisory roles I had with other startups were in a much different, less regulated sort of structure. Right now, even the regulators are much more moving toward systemized medical devices or AI. You see more female accelerator programs and investor programs now. Lots of governments are trying to put their investment focus on women's health now because people have realized how backwards the research is. There is still a long way to go to have gender-equal data stratification, but there is still lots of improvement in people's perception of what female health is. Now femtech is a real field in itself, and it's growing so rapidly.

Roswitha Verwer: And I think what is also beautiful, for example, is that in the Netherlands, a hospital opened a whole wing fully dedicated to femtech, women's health, and fertility to conduct trials and studies there. Because we fight so hard as all-female founders to make this an existing environment, you see these changes happening.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: Traction is definitely increasing within the sector. We interact with lots of other female founders and other femtech companies on a daily basis. We try and share our learnings with them and they share their learnings with us. It is good in a way that we're able to build this community around us and we know that we're not alone fighting this battle.

Roswitha Verwer: It's really supportive; it's not a competition. Everyone wants to help each other and share connections.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: Now the investment part should catch up. The professional part is moving in the right direction, even if it's a bit slower than expected, but the finance part is lagging behind. Investors are still not touching this as much as they should. I'm happy to be involved and to have started my first femtech investment. Why are they so behind?

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: I feel like it's a trend people are following. Everybody is trying to follow VCs or LPs investing in AI for literally anything sports, finance, insurance, making a table. All I can say is even "vagina" has AI in it, so you should invest in women's health!

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: Yes, it's important. You have AI tools as well; you are developing your platform and application. Do you see any changes in fundraising conversations from two years ago to yesterday?

Roswitha Verwer: Yes. When I first started, I was met with a lot of intensity. People literally bluntly said, "It's not going to work, you're crazy." Then it moved to them feeling a bit shy because using the word "vagina" and "vaginal health" made them feel a little bit uncomfortable, depending on which culture I was talking to.

Now, because we have a much more online presence and strength with our achievements in the first six months of starting YON E, I already won our first conference and ended up in Forbes I created this buzz. That really helped with conversations because an investor of course will check what you're doing. I want to make sure everything has a certain level of professionalism. Now I'm also comfortable enough to identify the investor profile, and if it's not the right fit, I will say that because I don't want to waste anyone's time.

We have many good conversations with VC companies, but they want to wait until we are in clinical trials. They understand the potential and see the vision, and they applaud us for educating the market before entering it, but then they say we are just too early for them.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: We've de-risked the idea and the concept. We know this works; we know the sensor we're trying to use works. We have the proof. Now what we need money for is to build a prototype so that we can go to clinical trials. Anybody putting their money in a startup is taking a gamble, but once you analyze it, you see that we've actually de-risked most of the things that could go wrong already.

Roswitha Verwer: I also think from an investor perspective that sometimes it's about critical listening. I've noticed in pitch conferences that investors are sometimes on a call or driving back home. If that's your moment, you're just kind of unlucky. I've pitched to someone who was driving in a car and I just knew it wasn't going to happen. You only have one chance to make a first impression. Certain VCs see 400 decks in a week, and if you are the last one on a Friday when people are tired, they have a different eye.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: And in pitch meetings, some people were like, "Is this really a problem?" So first of all, we have to make them understand that this is a real problem that women face, and then the second step is to make them understand how far we've come.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: It's not an easy job. I am also reviewing hundreds of pitch decks and it's really difficult and tiring. I don't do it personally because I don't have enough time for it; I would need 40 or 50 hours per day. We have a team for that. We make a first wide check of the pitch decks and pick which ones could be interesting, but in most cases, I have personal connections. I usually don't accept any cold emails.

As I mentioned to you in the previous discussion, the personal part is more important for me. Of course, we are checking that it is a real problem and not an artificial problem. After that, the team is the most important. If you get a good team, you can make a unicorn. But even if you have the best product and you get a lazy or wrong team, it will fail.

We have developed a new model where we are more partnering, not just investing in companies. We grow together. Even if we cannot invest in so many companies because of limited time, the outcome is much better because we reach a higher chance of better outcomes. We decrease the risk for the company and also for the co-investors. What is your next step? What are you looking for currently?

Roswitha Verwer: Our next step is to close the pre-seed with 600,000. From that, we can finalize TRL 4 and start planning and preparing clinical trials. This also means that we will have our prototype, and we will finish everything related to the TRL 4 phase. We will continue with our patents, which is a lot of work since every state in the US needs a different patent. We'll launch different publications at the same time our team is scaling, and we will have fully finalized B2C and B2B applications ready.

It would be amazing to find additional investors or co-investors who are really value-driven as well. We hope to close that in January or mid-February, and then we can start raising a seed round of approximately 5.5 million.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: We will work hard to reach this point, especially since you made so much extra effort in the recent months to reach your milestones in advance. It will be nice to keep this momentum and speed going. It is also in the best interest of the investors, because you reach the exit point much earlier than expected.

Roswitha Verwer: I require a lot of the team because we have a lot of responsibilities, but the level that we're working on is the minimum for us because it's so hard for women to raise funds. I want to set the standard and prove to everyone who said no that YON E should have been a good opportunity. I hope it also showcases that we should trust women more with investments. We work hard because we want to satisfy the investors, the team, and the patients.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: You have a very important role in this and I'm very happy that you will be a role model for many founders and investors. I'm just wishing that it continues this way.

Roswitha Verwer: Thank you so much for believing in us and bringing the value and having this relationship with us where I feel comfortable to ask you questions and get advice. I hear many stories that there's often a disconnect between the investor and the founding team. I'm really happy and grateful that you can provide that to us.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: It's part of our model. Partnering is more important than just investing, sending the money, and hoping for the best, which is the current model. Most financial investors just analyze numbers and hope that it'll work.

Dr. Muskaan Bhan: I think it's this hands-on approach in all our teams, including the investment team, our internal team, and the advisory team that we really value. That's why we've been able to accelerate as much as we have.

Dr. Peter M Kovacs: You are incredible. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation. We'll continue from here.