FemTech Spain Industry Report 2026

We partnered with FemTech Spain to produce the FemTech Spain Industry Report 2026. Funding is tough for female founders in every sector, and we wanted to know whether that holds in health, where women are also the patients being underserved.

It holds. Women's health receives 6% of private healthcare investment, and 90% of that goes to 3 areas: women's cancers, reproductive health and maternal health. Under 1% reaches the companies built specifically for women's health.

The discount on the label

European Series A valuations for FemTech run 20 to 30% below comparable digital-health companies. For a founder, being filed under women's health is a structural penalty. For an investor, it is an entry price for demand that already exists.

The discount follows the investor base. About 1 investor in 7 has women's health in their strategy as a named vertical, and half of all investment in women's-health-specific companies still sits at the earliest stages, versus a third for healthcare overall. Roughly $2B went into women's health globally in 2025, down from the 2024 peak.

Spain builds the expensive kind

The FemTech map in Spain grew from 50 companies to 64 in a year. A third of them are regulated technology: medical devices, diagnostics and therapeutics. For an ecosystem mostly founded after 2019, that is a heavy concentration of CE-marked, clinically validated work.

It is also the hardest kind to finance. Most Spanish rounds have closed at seed, below €2M, and there is no Spanish venture fund dedicated to women's health. The gap is the Series A and B cheques that carry a validated company to scale.

The route to market has its own gap. Royal Decree 415/2026 creates a single national framework for evaluating digital health products. The evaluations are non-binding, though, and reimbursement and procurement still sit with Spain's 17 regions, while France reimburses through PECAN and Germany through DiGA.

Built on half the data

Carmen Izuzkiza and I wrote the Ship2B chapter, on why a gender lens belongs in every investment decision and not only in the ones labelled women's health. Sex shapes how nearly every disease shows up in the body, and most products are still tested as if it did not.

Women were 41% of US clinical-trial participants between 2016 and 2019. 76 of the 86 most-prescribed drugs show sex-based differences in how the body processes them, and women suffer adverse drug reactions at nearly twice the male rate. Across 6.9M patients and 770 diseases, women are diagnosed 4 years later than men.

A product tested on a population that is 60% male underperforms for the other half by design. That applies to a cardiac diagnostic as much as to a menopause app.

Who decides where the money goes

Only 11% of VC decision-makers globally are women, and firms with a female partner back female founders 2.3 times more often. The performance record is already there: 272 women's health exits between 2000 and 2024, with realised value past $100B once 2025's deals are counted.

The category looked emerging mainly because nobody had measured it as one. Spain now has the companies and the public attention. What it is missing is capital that can hold a clinical company through its expensive years.