Women’s Health Is Breaking Records And Breaking No Ceilings

Silicon Valley Bank’s March 2026 report, “Women’s Health Innovation: The Future of Healthcare,” declares women’s health “the blueprint for the future of healthcare.” The numbers back the ambition: $1.58 billion invested in 2025, record early-stage valuations, and two new unicorns already in the first quarter of 2026.

But investors and lenders who work inside this sector every day describe a more complicated reality. The momentum is real—and so is the ceiling the sector built for itself. Breaking through it, they argue, requires women’s health to do something counterintuitive: market its way out of the category altogether.

At the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in January 2026, Naseem Sayani watched something that stopped her cold. A late-stage healthcare investor sat on a panel immediately after the launch of the “Follow the Exits” report—a report by AOA Dx documenting more than $100 billion in realized exit returns from startups focused on conditions that uniquely, differently, or disproportionately affect women—and told the room the problem with women’s health was that it just hadn’t produced exits.

The data had just been presented. The investor had not absorbed it.

“The echo chamber has a responsibility to share and amplify what we now know about returns in rooms that we’re not usually in to break this down,” argues Sayani, an angel investor and director of the Innovator’s Circle at WHAM (Women’s Health Access Matters).

Megan Scheffel, head of life science and healthcare at Silicon Valley Bank—where she leads debt financing and venture lending across the sector—sees the same pattern from the lending side. The investors who say they don’t touch women’s health often already do.

“People are, well, I don’t invest in women’s health,” Scheffel notes. “You actually do, I’ve seen your portfolio. You just don’t know it.”

The SVB report doesn’t name this problem directly: Women’s health has built a formidable community of believers, and that community has become its own boundary. The conferences are full. The panels overflow. The data improves. And yet the capital that could move the sector into the mainstream sits in rooms that none of this reaches.

SVB’s data projects 2026 will be a record year for women’s health investment. Midi Health and Pomelo Care reached unicorn status in Q1 alone, and Scheffel confirms the trajectory: Given those two raises, the year will almost certainly break records.

Rachel Butler, president of the Catalytic Impact Foundation—a nonprofit and member of WHAM’s Innovators Circle that pools philanthropic capital and deploys it like an early-stage venture fund, with nine exits since its first investment in 2019—welcomes the headline and immediately reads the footnote.

“Half of it has been two companies,” Butler observes.

Scheffel places it in a broader context. Concentration isn’t a woman’s health phenomenon, it’s the defining feature of venture right now. She notes that in Q1 2026 tech investing broadly, “76% of the VC investments went to five players.”

The deal mix tells the same story. Healthtech—including femtech, the women’s-health-specific segment—once dominated women’s health investment but fell sharply in 2025 as oncology-focused biopharma and devices absorbed the capital. Midi and Pomelo represent healthtech’s resurgence, but through companies already operating at scale. For founders at pre-seed and seed—where Butler’s fund often serves as the first institutional check—the climate is getting harder, not easier.

“It is harder to raise,” Scheffel confirms for early stage companies.

Butler’s fund has seen early-stage founders offer to reopen prior notes, add caps, and lower valuations just to get institutional capital through the door. A record investment year built at the top of the market is not the same as a thriving ecosystem throughout it.

SVB’s report makes a strong case for expanding what counts as women’s health. Women bear 34% more of the burden of mental and behavioral health conditions, 36% more for musculoskeletal disorders, and 62% more for neurological conditions. Those numbers argue for a category far larger than fertility and reproductive care, which account for just 5% to 8% of the overall female health burden.

McKinsey’s “Closing the Women’s Health Gap: A $1 Trillion Opportunity to Improve Lives and Economies” adds a figure that should stop investors cold: 43% of the total female health burden comes from conditions that don’t affect women uniquely, differently or disproportionately at all—conditions that standard “women’s health” investment frameworks don’t track, measure, or fund. Address the full burden of women’s health, McKinsey calculates, and the global economy gains at least $1 trillion annually by 2040. Taken together, the SVB and McKinsey data suggest that the sector’s self-definition remains too narrow, even after years of expansion.

That expanding definition creates a measurement problem that runs counter to the sector’s own investment narrative. Butler has watched it play out across multiple datasets and reports.

“It almost makes some of this data meaningless,” she argues. “We have to move towards something that’s sort of accepted by all and understood.”

The oft-cited statistic that only 5% of healthcare venture capital reaches women’s health uses reproductive health as its denominator. Expand to conditions that disproportionately and differently affect women and the figure changes entirely—SVB’s $$9.1 billion figure does exactly that, while its $1.58 billion figure uses a narrower lens. Both get cited as “women’s health investment.” Neither is wrong. That’s the problem.

Sayani sees the denominator issue play out directly in LP conversations. The pitch that gets siloed leads with the category. The pitch that gets funded leads with the market.

“If LPs understand the value of understanding sex-based differences and the value proposition of an investment is, for example, precision intelligence for cardiovascular care, with a first target audience that is women, the value potential can be easily demonstrated and underlined,” she explains.

This is where the three arguments converge. The exit women’s health is building toward isn’t an IPO or an acquisition—it’s the elimination of “women’s health” as a separate investment category altogether.

At the HERS conference in March 2026, a question circulated that Scheffel found clarifying: By 2030, will we still call this women’s health?

“It’s just health,” she reflects.

Sayani has pushed that language shift from the investment side for years.

“Women’s healthcare is healthcare, and if we can solve for women better—whether through precision health, smarter diagnosis solutions, less gaslighting, and generally better care—we solve for everyone better,” she argues.

The companies breaking through—Midi, Pomelo, and the oncology firms absorbing biopharma dollars—are succeeding in part because they pitch to payers, employers, and acquirers in the language of healthcare return on investment, not in the language of women’s health advocacy. Investors who back them often don’t know they’ve entered the category until someone points it out. That’s not a communications failure. That’s what success looks like from the inside.

As Scheffel puts it: “We just need to change the labels.”

SVB’s 2026 projection will likely prove accurate. The unicorns are minted. The biopharma pipeline is deeper than ever. Private equity—activated by Blackstone and TPG’s acquisition of Hologic—is circling diagnostics and devices it once ignored.

But a record year that concentrates on two deals, flows to mid-stage companies, and gets celebrated in rooms the largest allocators don’t attend is a proof point that hasn’t reached the people with the power to act on it. The women’s health sector has earned the right to make that case. The next move is making it somewhere new.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com