It’s not you, it is women’s health

They say raising money is like dating. So when it comes to women’s health fundraising, it is truly like real life dating these days; feels so broken.

There are no hot deals.

There are no fast rounds.

There are no investors begging you to take their money.

There are no congratulations for working on a moonshot.

It is just a survival game. You win by staying alive.

Yes, things are improving and, yes, there is a vibe shift, and yes, you hear of the founder that everyone is throwing capital at over half baked ideas, but that exists in every area, it is only more glaring in a space where the pie feels so small.

Just this week I met someone from a very famous ivy league academic institute. Her scientific accolades and collaborators are the elite of the elite. She has had over 2M of non-dilutive funding and yet has had very little success in raising private capital by pitching something that she might just want to keep in the surgical oncology world versus the women’s health one.

Another founder called me today about how crazy it is that in her last startup in AI she raised in 3 days and now VCs who claim to want anything at the cusp of deep tech and moonshots are telling her they are too busy to jump on a call to at the very least find out what her pioneering reproductive tech company is doing.

Every term that applies to dating; ghosting bread crumbs, even love bombing is a thing.

Everyday you hear of a new company getting hundreds of millions of dollars to do something in Ai while one reads in so many fund’s thesis they want the “weird ones”, the “courageous founders”, the ones working on the world’s hardest problems. Meanwhile, when you see funding rounds it appears our hardest problem has been SaaS, and now of course, Ai.

Never mind that if we solved reproductive aging the we could help fix population decline…

Like in dating, when you are fundraising, investors are looking for red flags, and sadly “women’s health” feels like one. The patina of charity takes over, and you are no longer a hot prospect - just a meeting to finish.

when fundraising women’s health = 🚩

So ladies (and gentlemen) trust me when I say it is not you.

My post on how we are not truly funding things that matter struck a chord with so many because of the burning frustration felt when what you read and hear is not the same as what you experience. It is like watching that couple that got married over one successful DM…why not me, you ask.

Laura Minquini@LauraMinquini

One of the saddest realizations being in tech is that a lot of capital allocation happens on vibes, networks, fomo, and marketing. I have said this to a lot of our researchers; the best and most rigorous science does not necessarily win. The downstream effects of that is that

四川麻辣燙 @sichuan_mala

I've just written a new post raising a series of concerns about Nucleus Genomics, a company that offers embryo selection services based on polygenic scores for couples undergoing IVF. I was shocked by the degree to which Nucleus's work is obviously plagiarized or simply wrong.

6:33 PM · Nov 22, 2025 · 86.7K Views

26 Replies · 39 Reposts · 423 Likes

Like in dating you cannot force yourself on someone who to them, you are not their jam (or they are only concerned with being in a hot deal so they can compete with their peers, or they are following what so and so are investing on, or because platforms are hot right now they can’t look at you). Absolutely everyone has their own battles to fight. Even investors.

Getting capital, like successful dating, a numbers game. Keep going at it. The right person and capital is out there for you.

Laura Minquini

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Thank you to Mariella Agapiou for this great article “Rewriting R&D funding for women’s health” and novel funding mechanisms.

We are always pushing the envelope to create new pools of capital to bridge “the valley of death” .

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The new Endgame podcast with powerhouse Amanda Cassatt, founder of Serotonin is out! She brings you conversations with the visionaries driving breakthrough technologies and shaping the future.

AthenaDAO’s Laura Minquini and Amanda chat about women’s longevity, ReproTech and about building community to push forward women’s health into biotech.