By
Steve Muchoki
May 6th, 2024
There are different offshoots of technology and FemTech, an umbrella word coined by entrepreneur Ida Tin, is growing as an industry of its own.
In an interview with CNBC, Danish author and entrepreneur Ida Tin talked about the FemTech world beginning with how she stumbled on the path and where the industry currently is with respect to adoption and funding. Billed to study Art in College, Tin said she veered into a room where there was an anticipated interview for a business course.
“I literally got lost in the hallways and I ended up in some office where they were waiting for a candidate to do [the business course interview],” Tin said.
She took the course and combined with her Art background, she started Clue, a company focused on Menstrual Health. With the app being one of the core pioneers in the sector at the time, it has grown in traction over the years. Today, Clue is featured in more than 10 languages, and it has a monthly active user base of more than 11 million people.
Speaking about how she coined the FemTech name, Tin noted that there were many companies creating similar products but with a very wide variation. She believed the firms “felt like kindred spirits and I was trying to figure out how we spoke about ourselves and our products … So I really wanted something that could pull it together under one umbrella.”
For the categorization process, the FemTech name has helped startups build in the space. Per the CNBC report, it becomes easier for investors to say they are investing in a particular ecosystem, than in a company with no specific categorizations.
Today, the FemTech world has grown by a mile and more companies are constantly churning innovative products and solutions into the space.
The Core Challenges with the FemTech Industry
The FemTech industry still has a shortfall of users when compared to the diversity of products and the population of women who need these products from one region to the other.
While this is a bottleneck, Tin also pointed out the fact that the FemTech industry is grossly underfunded by partners in the Venture Capital world when compared to new industries like the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
“We’re still getting peanuts to play with when you see the amount of money that has been invested into, you know, e-scooters, car sharing … They just have so much money to build very impressive companies. I haven’t seen that kind of funding yet at all,” Tin said.
While Tin acknowledged that her own company has been able to raise a lot of money to date, she noted that more effort will still need to be invested in order to attract the needed funding to scale.
“We have to prove ourselves so hard along this journey,” she said. “We’ve raised a lot of money and you know, comparably, we’ve done well. But I think we’ve been underfunded all along, honestly.”