AthenaBIO

By: Laura Minquini

If you ask ChatGPT or Claude about women’s health funding, they will do a nice write-up with some of the well-known facts we all repeat.

However, in the last month alone, The Gates Foundation pledged $2.5 billion to advance women's health in developing nations and Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures through Welcome Leap is allocating 100 million to biomedical R&D via DARPA-style programs.

Attention goes where capital goes and the signals are there. This is why two things that were said to me by two important female investors in the early days of AthenaDAO are so true today:

1. Sonja Kon, VP of Circle for Europe who was the first woman to say yes to our concept, and was our first female funder said, “Your token is never going to reflect the value of what you are building because of how crypto works. You should one day work with equity”.

2. On a call with Speedinvest’s Andrea Zitna she thought that when women’s health starts having more capital interests for scientific assets, AthenaDAO could be very well positioned.

Leave it to women to have incredible foresight.

Fortuitously, knowing I wanted to be in publications like Anna O’Sullivan’s FutureFemHealth, we jumped on a call that ended up going way over and led to this exclusive announcement with her publication. She did such an amazing job at distilling our concept, I won’t elaborate further. Please read it below.

I just want to remind everyone that first and foremost, we - and particularly I - are firm believers that women’s health should not be considered a charity. We are determined to prove that, through new funding models that are agile, capital efficient, de-risked, and focused on scientific knowledge, we can show that women’s health R&D is a massive growth market opportunity where significant economic value will be generated.

This is why we are launching AthenaBIO.