Femtech entrepreneur Stacy Chin attributes her success to backing by mentors and learning how to navigate conversations about personal products in a businesslike manner.
In her quest to become a tech entrepreneur, Stacy Chin has been an ace at tackling thorny intellectual challenges, mastering everything from molecules to manufacturing.
These mostly female leaders of firms with products addressing women's health concerns are winning in a big way, raising about $1.1 billion in startup funds over the past few years.
But the 28-year-old founder of HydroGlyde Coatings, based in Worcester, Mass., admitted to being momentarily stumped recently when pitching her product – a new kind of self-lubricating condom – to venture capitalists.
"Being a young female scientist and going into that sexual healthcare space, it was definitely a little bit challenging to learn how to navigate during presentations and pitches when there were a lot of older males in the audience," said Chin, whose product is of special appeal to older women suffering from vaginal dryness. "I eventually figured it out, but it wasn't easy."
Chin is at the vanguard of a new generation of "femtech" entrepreneurs heading companies with names like LOLA Tampons, Prelude Fertility, and Peach, bringing once-taboo topics like menstruation, ovulation, incontinence, breastfeeding, pelvic pain and, yes, female sexual pleasure to the highest chambers of finance. These mostly female leaders of firms with products addressing women's health concerns are winning in a big way, raising about $1.1 billion in startup funds over the past few years, according to the New York data analytics firm CB Insights.
"We are definitely at a watershed moment for femtech. But we need to remember that [it's] an overnight sensation that is decades in the making."
If the question is "Why now?", the answer may be that femtech leaders are benefiting from the current conversations around respect for women in the workplace, and long-term efforts to achieve gender equality in the male-dominated tech industry.
"We are definitely at a watershed moment for femtech," said Rachel Braun Scherl, a self-described "vaginepreneur" whose new book, "Orgasmic Leadership," profiles femtech leaders. "But we need to remember that femtech is an overnight sensation that is decades in the making."
In contrast with earlier and perhaps less successful generations of women in tech, these pioneers can point to mentors who are readily accessible, as well as more female VC and corporate heads they can directly address when making pitches. There's also a changing cultural landscape where sexual harassment is in the news and women who talk openly about sex in a business context can be taken seriously.
"Change is definitely in the air," said Kevin O'Sullivan, the president and CEO of Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, who sponsored Chin and has helped launch more than a hundred biotech companies in his home state since the 1980s.
Like a pinprick bursting a balloon, the #MeToo social movement and its focus on the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault is a factor in the success of femtech, some experts believe, provoking heightened awareness about the role of women in society -- including equal access to start-up capital.
"If such a difficult topic is being discussed in the open, that means more and more people are speaking out and are no longer afraid about sharing their own concerns," said Debbie Hart, president and CEO of BioNJ, a business trade group she founded in 1994. "That's empowering the whole women's movement."
The power of programs that allow young women to witness successful older women in leadership cannot be overstated.
Observers like Hart say that femtech's advent is also due to a payoff from longer-term investments in a slew of programs encouraging girls to pursue STEM careers and women to be hired as leaders, as well as changing social norms to allow female health to be part of the public discourse.
The power of programs that allow young women to witness successful older women in leadership cannot be overstated, according to Susan Scherreik of the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
"What I have found in entrepreneurship is that it's all about two things: role models and mentoring," said Scherreik, director of the university's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.
One of Scherreik's top students, Madison Schott, is convinced that the availability of female mentors has been instrumental to her success and will remain so in her future. "It definitely is very encouraging," said Schott, who won the "Pirates Pitch" university-wide business start-up competition in April for an app she is developing that uses AI to guide readers to reliable news sources. "Woman to woman," she added, "you can be more open when you have questions or problems."
Programs that showcase successful females in leadership positions are beginning to bear fruit, inspiring a new generation of females in business, according to Susan Scherreik (at left), director of Seton Hall University's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Stillman School of Business. Her student, Madison Schott (right), is the winner of a university-wide business start-up competition for an app she is developing.
While femtech entrepreneurs may be the beneficiaries of change, they also may be its agents. Scherl, the author, who has been working in the female healthcare sector for more than a decade, believes in persistence. In 2010, organizers of a major awards show banned a product she was marketing, Zestra Essential Arousal Oils*, from a gift bag for honorees. Two years ago, however, times changed and femtech prevailed. The company making goodie bags for Academy Awards nominees included another one of her products, Nuelle's Fiera, a $250 vibrator.
"We come from so many different perspectives when it comes to sex, whether it is cultural, religious, age-related, or even from a trauma, so we never have created a common language," Scherl said. "But we in femtech are making huge progress. We are not only selling products now, we are selling conversation, and we are selling a comfort with sexuality in all its complex forms."
[*Correction: Due to a reporting error, the product that was banned in 2010 was initially identified as Nuelle's Fiera, not Zestra Essential Arousal Oils. The article has been updated for accuracy. --Editor]
AI was integral to creating Moderna's mRNA vaccine against COVID.
But the truth is that before ChatGPT nabbed the public’s attention, AI was already here, and it was doing more important things than writing essays for lazy college students. Case in point: It was key to saving the lives of tens of millions of people.
AI-designed mRNA vaccines
As Dave Johnson, chief data and AI officer at Moderna, told MIT Technology Review‘s In Machines We Trust podcast in 2022, AI was integral to creating the company’s highly effective mRNA vaccine against COVID. Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines collectively saved between 15 and 20 million lives, according to one estimate from 2022.
Johnson described how AI was hard at work at Moderna, well before COVID arose to infect billions. The pharmaceutical company focuses on finding mRNA therapies to fight off infectious disease, treat cancer, or thwart genetic illness, among other medical applications. Messenger RNA molecules are essentially molecular instructions for cells that tell them how to create specific proteins, which do everything from fighting infection, to catalyzing reactions, to relaying cellular messages.
Johnson and his team put AI and automated robots to work making lots of different mRNAs for scientists to experiment with. Moderna quickly went from making about 30 per month to more than one thousand. They then created AI algorithms to optimize mRNA to maximize protein production in the body — more bang for the biological buck.
For Johnson and his team’s next trick, they used AI to automate science, itself. Once Moderna’s scientists have an mRNA to experiment with, they do pre-clinical tests in the lab. They then pore over reams of data to see which mRNAs could progress to the next stage: animal trials. This process is long, repetitive, and soul-sucking — ill-suited to a creative scientist but great for a mindless AI algorithm. With scientists’ input, models were made to automate this tedious process.
“We don’t think about AI in the context of replacing humans,” says Dave Johnson, chief data and AI officer at Moderna. “We always think about it in terms of this human-machine collaboration, because they’re good at different things. Humans are really good at creativity and flexibility and insight, whereas machines are really good at precision and giving the exact same result every single time and doing it at scale and speed.”
All these AI systems were in put in place over the past decade. Then COVID showed up. So when the genome sequence of the coronavirus was made public in January 2020, Moderna was off to the races pumping out and testing mRNAs that would tell cells how to manufacture the coronavirus’s spike protein so that the body’s immune system would recognize and destroy it. Within 42 days, the company had an mRNA vaccine ready to be tested in humans. It eventually went into hundreds of millions of arms.
Biotech harnesses the power of AI
Moderna is now turning its attention to other ailments that could be solved with mRNA, and the company is continuing to lean on AI. Scientists are still coming to Johnson with automation requests, which he happily obliges.
“We don’t think about AI in the context of replacing humans,” he told the Me, Myself, and AI podcast. “We always think about it in terms of this human-machine collaboration, because they’re good at different things. Humans are really good at creativity and flexibility and insight, whereas machines are really good at precision and giving the exact same result every single time and doing it at scale and speed.”
Moderna, which was founded as a “digital biotech,” is undoubtedly the poster child of AI use in mRNA vaccines. Moderna recently signed a deal with IBM to use the company’s quantum computers as well as its proprietary generative AI, MoLFormer.
Moderna’s success is encouraging other companies to follow its example. In January, BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to make the other highly effective mRNA vaccine against COVID, acquired the company InstaDeep for $440 million to implement its machine learning AI across its mRNA medicine platform. And in May, Chinese technology giant Baidu announced an AI tool that designs super-optimized mRNA sequences in minutes. A nearly countless number of mRNA molecules can code for the same protein, but some are more stable and result in the production of more proteins. Baidu’s AI, called “LinearDesign,” finds these mRNAs. The company licensed the tool to French pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
Writing in the journal Accounts of Chemical Research in late 2021, Sebastian M. Castillo-Hair and Georg Seelig, computer engineers who focus on synthetic biology at the University of Washington, forecast that AI machine learning models will further accelerate the biotechnology research process, putting mRNA medicine into overdrive to the benefit of all.
This article originally appeared on Big Think, home of the brightest minds and biggest ideas of all time.
