The future of FemTech: Emerging trends and challenges

On 12 May 2026, DLA Piper hosted its FemTech Now event in London, looking at regulation, innovation and the investment trends shaping women’s health. The event brought together a remarkable group of female leaders from across the women’s health ecosystem.

The evening featured keynote contributions from Professor Dame Sue Hill (Chief Scientific Officer for NHS England) and Dr Sue Mann (Clinical Director for Women’s Health, NHS England). Among the attendees were founders, investors and business leaders working at the cutting edge of the FemTech ecosystem, including Dr Léa Wenger (Cyclana Bio), Dr Mridula Pore (Peppy), Vivien de Tusch-Lec (RYSE Asset Management), Karina Vazirova (FemTech Lab) and Melanie Christopher (Capgemini).

One message rang out loud and clear; FemTech’s moment has arrived. Opportunities to innovate are plentiful, but improving women’s health outcomes requires responsible innovation incorporating AI-empowered technology to bridge historical research gaps. It also needs coordinated progress across funding, data governance, and integration with health systems, recognising the ever-increasing web of regulation that surrounds the space.

This article explores the key themes from the evening, including emerging trends, challenges and opportunities for the future of FemTech.

 

The female health gap: From the margins to the mainstream

Here’s a striking fact from the event: women live longer than men but they spend around a quarter of their working lives in poorer health. Conditions that affect women are often poorly understood and chronically underdiagnosed. Long diagnosis and treatment delays are the norm, not the exception.

Endometriosis exemplifies the challenge. Despite affecting one in ten women, treatment hasn’t changed for the last 30 years. This stagnation stems from a combination of factors: a lack of understanding of the basic disease mechanism, difficulty modelling the condition in research (for example, we learned that mice don’t menstruate), and the complexity of hormonal variability – the endometrium changes daily. Pain, a key symptom, is subjective and difficult to quantify, making drug approval pathways particularly challenging. Without a clear clinical mechanism on which to develop treatments, attracting investment is inherently difficult.

We heard that much of women’s health burden falls during peak working years, leading to lost working days, reduced productivity, slower career progression and higher levels of workforce dropout than for men. This has a significant impact on the talent pipeline for businesses and on national productivity.

The good news? The conversation is shifting. Women’s health is becoming easier to talk about in the mainstream. It’s no longer seen solely as a healthcare or equality issue but recognised as a broader social one, with women’s health being linked to the health of children and partners. It’s also seen as a core business and economic concern, garnering the attention of government, employers and investors. This shift is reflected in stakeholder engagement and a rapidly expanding global FemTech market, projected to reach USD103 billion by 2030.

Further good news is that the narrow perception of FemTech itself is shifting. It’s changing from an association primarily with reproductive health to encompassing conditions affecting both sexes but disproportionately impacting women in numbers or severity. This reframing is critical. Few companies are currently tracking non-reproductive conditions – such as cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and chronic pain – through a female biology lens. This is both a significant market gap and an opportunity for innovation. Research is needed on how women’s hormones affect disease outcomes across conditions, unlocking investment and improved care in areas long overlooked.

 

Beyond awareness: The technologies transforming women’s health

If data is the engine, AI is the accelerator pedal. Advances in data analytics, AI and machine learning and diagnostics are enabling earlier detection of conditions, more personalised treatment and a fundamental shift towards preventative care. We heard how wearables that continuously monitor health are leading to predictive tools that can empower patients. Developments in genomics and robotics are opening up ever more opportunity in the sector.

Genomics is emerging as a transformative force. The NHS Genomic Medicine Service is helping drive this transformation. By 2035, genomic insights are expected to inform half of all healthcare interactions, requiring adoption not only in specialist centres but in primary and community care. The service is developing a Unified Genomic Record, integrating genomic data with clinical and diagnostic data in near real time, linked to the Single Patient Record. For FemTech, this creates opportunities to leverage population-level genomic data to advance understanding of conditions that disproportionately affect women.

These innovations are starting to address long-standing gaps in clinical needs, particularly in areas where large-scale research simply wasn’t feasible before. But technology alone won’t close the gap. Our panel was clear; those building in the FemTech space need a supportive funding ecosystem.

 

Innovation and investment incentives

The investment landscape tells a story of both ambition and frustration. According to DLA Piper’s AI Year research (which maps fast-moving AI trends over the last 12 months), life sciences companies are poised to make AI investments totalling nearly USD11 billion in the first half of 2026 alone; yet the risks associated with incentives for investors can make accessing capital difficult for early-stage FemTech founders.

Often, despite clear unmet clinical need, FemTech companies face long regulatory timelines, high up-front costs and significant legal and regulatory complexity in getting to market, making investors cautious.

We heard that investors are increasingly favouring FemTech companies with a clear roadmap to integrate with healthcare systems to help ensure investment returns. But getting FemTech into the hands of clinicians and patients requires navigating not just complex regulation but also building trust, and demonstrating real-world value. This creates a circular problem. Health systems need evidence before adopting solutions but FemTech companies need some level of adoption to generate that evidence.

 

Data: An engine of progress and a limitation

FemTech development needs data. The sector benefits from significant user engagement, particularly in consumer-facing applications such as menstrual tracking apps – which an estimated 50 million women use worldwide – providing a rich source of real-world data. This has the potential to support more extensive and inclusive research, improve diagnostics and enable personalised care at scale.

But it’s clear there are significant limitations and risks associated with FemTech data.

From a practical perspective, datasets are often fragmented, incomplete and not sufficiently longitudinal. Biological variability, including the impact of hormonal cycles, adds further complexity, making analysis and interpretation more challenging.

Data is also often “locked up.” Large pharmaceutical companies hold vast repositories of clinical trial data, but there’s no incentive to share it – even failed trial data – with potential competitors. This creates data silos that limit innovation. Researchers expressed concern at the event that businesses are building protective “moats” around their data assets, and alignment between data owners and FemTech innovators remains poor. A broader societal question is emerging; who should own, access and benefit from biological and medical data?

From a legal and ethical perspective, the sensitivity of women’s health data introduces heightened risks. This data can reveal deeply personal information beyond health status, including cultural and religious practices. This raises concerns around re-identification, misuse and long-term harm in the event of data breaches, which are often considered a matter of “when” and not “if.” When a cyber incident occurs, the types of data held, the nature of that data, and the number of records compromised are all significant factors. The impact on a business is long-lasting, extending well beyond any immediate claims or regulatory action.

Against a backdrop of increasing regulatory scrutiny, participants emphasised the importance of “responsible innovation by design.” This includes embedding transparency and user control, robust security and governance frameworks and clear accountability across organisations.

Trust was consistently identified as a critical factor. Transparency is the foundation of that trust when it comes to using health data as an asset. As emphasised at the event, many individuals are willing to share their health data if it can help others, as long as they understand what’s happening to that data. In a sector handling highly sensitive data, effective governance isn’t only a compliance requirement but a fundamental enabler of adoption and scale.

 

Navigating the EU Digital Decade

FemTech sits at the intersection of a barrage of legislation, creating a highly complex and fragmented regulatory environment for companies in the sector. In Europe, the EU Digital Decade comprises a seemingly disparate set of laws, connected by common themes such as cybersecurity, AI, data strategy, digital services and privacy.

Relevant legislation includes the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, the NIS2 Directive, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and the revised Product Liability Directive. The Digital Decade suite of laws imposes obligations in areas such as registration with regulators, risk and conformity assessments, supply chain risk, governance, security and incident notification, and data sharing requirements.

For FemTech companies using AI and processing sensitive health data, this creates layered compliance requirements. According to DLA Piper’s AI Year survey, 55% of life sciences leaders rank cybersecurity attacks and data breaches as the most serious AI risk, and 74% expect an increase in unfair dismissal cases linked to poor AI policies.

Companies have to embed “responsible AI by design” principles from the outset, treating compliance not as a barrier but as a framework for responsible innovation and a competitive advantage.

 

The future of FemTech

Bridging the gap: The role of the NHS and public-private collaboration

The discussion also highlighted increasing alignment between the FemTech sector and UK health policy.

Both the NHS 10 Year Health Plan and the Life Sciences Sector Plan set out a bold vision for NHS transformation, with an ambition for the UK to become the third largest life sciences economy in the world by 2035.

The plans prioritise a shift from hospital to community care, from analogue to digital delivery, and from sickness treatment to prevention. The Women’s Health Strategy for England (refreshed in April 2026) has also played a key role in raising visibility and setting direction, with a greater emphasis on health beyond reproductive conditions.

There are also signs of growing openness to collaboration between the NHS and industry. Emerging models offer more structured pathways from early-stage development through to clinical validation and adoption, supported by partnership-led funding.

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Innovation Catalyst, launching in 2026, offers new streamlined funding models with enhanced support for biotech and MedTech SMEs across the translational phases of research if key milestones are met. It supports the NHS 10 Year Health Plan’s “five big bets” – data and AI, genomics, wearables, robotics and clinical trials reform – and operates through an end-to-end process with wrap-around support connecting innovators to testbeds, venture capital funds, regulators, procurement processes and support for commercialisation.

For FemTech companies, building with these routes in mind is becoming essential.

But there are still barriers. The NHS still faces budget constraints, fragmented care pathways and limited capacity to engage with early-stage innovation. It’s also grappling with how to prioritise competing demands and integrate new technologies into existing clinical workflows.

The strategic direction of the NHS and UK government is increasingly aligned with the ambitions of the FemTech sector. Both the NHS 10 Year Health Plan and the Life Sciences Sector Plan prioritise data, prevention and emerging technologies. The Women’s Health Strategy has also raised the visibility of women’s health issues and is expanding beyond reproductive health towards a life‑course approach.

Concluding remarks

The sector is moving beyond proof of concept and into delivery. The focus is now on scaling solutions and embedding them in healthcare systems and workplaces. Policy developments indicate that by 2027, large employers may have to implement women’s health action plans. And shifts in flexible working laws may move the burden of proof to employers.

Businesses are increasingly emerging as both customers and drivers of adoption, recognising that women’s poor health is bad for business. This will require continued alignment across technology, capital, regulation and health system reform to translate momentum into meaningful, system-wide impact. For investors and companies, greater emphasis is needed on regulatory readiness, data governance and route-to-market strategies that involve clear pathways to healthcare integration.

Companies need to be thinking about AI privacy by design from the outset. The event made one thing clear; to be successful companies can’t just innovate, they need to innovate responsibly.

This article is part of the FemTech Now series. Access the hub here.