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This report was developed with significant research, analysis, and writing by Lux Capital Summer Associate Shailee Samar.

Women’s health has been underserved, underfunded, and understudied for decades—an inequity that’s not just a glaring gap in care but also a missed trillion-dollar opportunity. From chronic underdiagnosis to inequitable research and lacking treatment options, women face systemic barriers to proper care.

Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer a transformative solution. With the global AI healthcare market valued at $20.8 billion in 2024 and projected to soar to $148 billion by 2029, the potential to revolutionize women’s health is immense. This report explores how AI can bridge longstanding gaps, improve health outcomes, and drive innovation, highlighting use cases and startups driving change.

The State of Women’s Health

Women represent 51% of the global population and 80% of the healthcare workforce. Yet, their healthcare is still considered a niche market. This narrative must shift.

Investing in women’s health is not just a moral imperative—it’s economically smart. Healthy women strengthen families, drive education, and fuel the workforce. Women drive 70%+ of all consumer spending decisions and healthcare spending decisions for their families. But, nearly 1 in 3 women report spending much of the previous day in physical pain. While women tend to live longer than men, they spend 25% more time in poor health, particularly during their working years, which translates to nine years spent sick or disabled. Closing this gap could potentially save 75 million years of life annually and boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion by 2040.

Women spend more than half of their adult lives in menopause and post-menopause—a stage often marked by significant health challenges. Yet, women’s health is frequently defined only by fertility and reproductive health, overlooking a much broader spectrum of issues. Nearly half of the health burden women face stems from conditions that also affect men but impact women disproportionately or differently, such as osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and mental health disorders.

Women often serve as the “chief medical officers” of their families. Yet, current health systems fail to provide them proper care, leading to the following issues:

‍Women’s health is chronically underfunded, understudied, and undertreated. Only 2% of overall healthcare VC funding has gone to women's health startups. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem: men make up 89% of investing partners at VC firms, so when founders pitch a women’s health company, investors may not understand the opportunity. Investors request comparables, but these are scarce precisely because of the limited prior investment. Compounding this, even when there are female investors, they can also be pigeonholed if they write more than one check in the women’s health space.

Women’s health is a large, still undertapped opportunity with the potential for significant returns. Although areas within women’s health are often dismissed as having a limited Total Addressable Market (TAM), there are plenty of opportunities with huge potential. For example, menopause and postmenopause impacts one billion women and represents a $600 billion opportunity. Similarly, doubling the $20M spent annually on coronary artery disease research in women could deliver a 9,500% return on investment. And, startups are proving this potential: Maven Clinic, a virtual clinic for women's and family health, was last valued at $1.7B. 

‍AI Can Transform Women’s Health

AI adoption in healthcare is accelerating rapidly, with the global AI healthcare market growing at a CAGR of 48%. While approximately 20% of healthcare practices have started using AI, its application in women's health remains notably limited. However, AI holds tremendous potential to revolutionize women's health, unlocking new opportunities for improved care and outcomes.

"Women’s health has always been critical, but today it’s more important than ever. With rapidly advancing AI and other technologies, we have the tools to address long-standing disparities, improve outcomes, and empower women and families to make informed decisions about their health. Prioritizing women’s health is not just about equity; it’s about unlocking the full potential of our society.” - Deena Shakir, General Partner at Lux Capital.

This report explores four key opportunity areas where AI can bridge health equity gaps and transform women’s health:

1. Enhance diagnosis: Women often face delayed or missed diagnoses for serious health conditions, such as endometriosis and cancer. AI can address this gap by predicting risks, guiding early assessments, and improving patient-doctor consultations.
2. Revamp treatments: Women regularly receive inadequate treatment, with disparities in mental health, maternal care, and menopause management. AI can help personalize treatments based on individual profiles, support physicians with clinical decision-making, and improve maternal health through tools that monitor vital signs and predict complications. 
3. Expand access: Women face delayed medical care due to caregiving responsibilities, financial barriers, lack of insurance coverage, and systemic inequities. AI can expand access to healthcare by offering convenient telemedicine and extended coverage.
4. Boost research: Women have historically been excluded from medical research, leading to treatments based on male physiology. AI can address this by diversifying trial participants, identifying gender-specific differences in disease progression, and increasing funding for women-focused diseases. 

For interested entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, we are thrilled to share these two new resources for the women’s health & AI ecosystem:

Women’s Health x AI Company Directory – a list of 80+ US startups working at the intersection of AI and women’s health across diverse solutions, from AI-driven diagnostics to personalized health platforms. Whether you’re looking to join an existing company or understand what already exists, this is a great place to start.

Women’s Health x AI Notable Investors – a list of 20+ venture capital firms in the US that have already invested in AI-driven startups improving women's health.

‍Fill out this form if you see a company that is missing or needs updating.

Women’s Health x AI Ecosystem

This report examines each key opportunity, highlighting primary use cases and emerging companies— including those within Lux’s portfolio. Although only a few leverage AI as a core focus today, many are starting to incorporate AI to enhance critical workflows and can serve as inspiration to aspiring entrepreneurs.

‍Enhance diagnosis

🚨 Problem → The female body should not be a mystery to modern medicine. Yet, women are often not diagnosed or are diagnosed too late. For example, endometriosis, a gynecological condition characterized by severe chronic pain and abnormal bleeding, affects 10% of women worldwide. Despite its prevalence, six out of ten women are not diagnosed, earning endometriosis the nickname 'the missed disease.

Testing for diseases that kill millions of women remains low. The World Health Organization indicates that 30-50% of cancers are preventable with early detection. However, 89% of women are not tested due to limited accessibility, insufficient proactive measures from healthcare providers, and broader societal challenges.

Society has long dismissed intrusive symptoms as unavoidable aspects of female biology, often framing them as too uncomfortable or shameful to discuss openly. This stigma has real consequences: a recent Maven Clinic survey found that 44% of millennials and 34% of Gen Xers avoided discussing their symptoms with healthcare providers due to fear of judgment or stigma. Even when women do seek medical attention, they frequently encounter delays in diagnosis or experience medical gaslighting. These barriers are even more severe for Black women—according to a study by the Urban Institute, Black adults reported experiencing unfair judgment and gaslighting by healthcare providers at three times the rate of their peers.

🤖 Where AI can help → AI has the potential to transform women’s health diagnostics by enabling early risk assessments, continuous patient monitoring, and advanced diagnostic tools, while also enhancing decision-making in collaboration with medical professionals.

Predict risk

AI can enhance diagnostic capabilities by integrating non-invasive tests, medical history, lifestyle factors, and genetic data to predict risks. This approach enables earlier interventions and delivers more accurate, comprehensive diagnoses. AI can also be used in emergency or primary care settings to prioritize patients at higher risk, such as identifying women experiencing atypical heart attack symptoms that might otherwise be overlooked.

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‍Guide assessments

AI can assist in early assessments by identifying symptoms and guiding women on when to seek medical attention, addressing conditions that are often overlooked or misdiagnosed. It can also help women prepare for doctor visits by organizing their symptoms, questions, and medical history, ensuring clear and effective communication with healthcare providers. Additionally, AI can counteract biases in healthcare by delivering evidence-based recommendations that account for gender, race, and socioeconomic factors, promoting fairness and accuracy in the diagnostic process.

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‍Monitor continuously

AI can continuously monitor vital signs and health metrics, especially during pregnancy or postpartum recovery. This can enable the early detection of potential complications such as preeclampsia or preterm labor. 

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Revamp treatments

🚨 Problem → Women frequently receive suboptimal treatment and care in critical areas like maternal health, mental health, and chronic pain:

1. Maternal health: Maternal mortality in the US doubled between 2014 and 2021, now standing five times higher in comparable countries. Healthcare systems disproportionately prioritize the newborn over the mother and postpartum care remains critically inadequate (see the harrowing story of Lux Capital’s General Partner Deena Shakir who experienced postpartum preeclampsia, a life-threatening condition that nearly resulted in a fatal stroke). Racial and socioeconomic disparities further worsen the issue: even among women with private insurance, Latina women had 22% more pregnancy complications than their white counterparts. 

2. Mental health and pain management: Women are three times more likely than men to experience common mental health issues, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reporting that 10% of women had a major depressive episode in the last year. The higher mental health issue prevalence can be due to hormonal fluctuations, trauma exposure, and societal pressures and often requires gender-specific solutions. Moreover, women’s pain is often overlooked and ignored. For example, one study showed women post-coronary bypass surgery were only half as likely to be prescribed painkillers as men.

3. Menopause: Women spend more than one third of their lives in menopause or perimenopause, experiencing symptoms like hot flashes, sleep disturbances, and night sweats. Economically, hot flashes alone lead to nearly $1,400 in health costs and $770 in lost productivity per person per year.  

🤖 Where AI can help → AI can personalize treatment plans and care delivery in an accessible manner that also integrates with a woman’s physicians. Additionally, AI can bridge critical gaps in healthcare access by delivering real-time insights and support, especially for underserved populations and those facing barriers to traditional care systems.

Personalize care

Healthcare providers often use a one-size-fits-all model for treatments given the limited bandwidth for each patient. In comparison, AI can tailor treatments based on a patient’s unique profile, including genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors.

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Support decisions

AI-based decision support tools can provide clinicians with evidence-based recommendations for diagnosing and treating female patients. 

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Expand access

🚨 Problem → Women often prioritize their family's health and well-being over their own, face societal pressures to downplay their symptoms, and navigate financial challenges and limited insurance access. These factors can deter them from seeking preventive care or adhering to prescribed treatments, compromising their overall health outcomes.

Access issues are further exacerbated by racial, socioeconomic, and geographic factors:

• Insurance disparities: The US faces systemic racial inequities in access to affordable healthcare coverage. In the US, 7% of white women are uninsured compared to 18% of Hispanic, 10% of Black, and 19% of American Indian or Alaska Native women.
• Caregiving responsibilities: Women of color are more likely to be primary caregivers for their families, with nearly 45% of Black women compared to 34% of white women. Caregiving leaves less opportunity to address their own health issues.
• Healthcare facilities: Black and Hispanic women are more likely to face delays in receiving healthcare due to financial constraints and systemic barriers.

🤖 Where AI can help → AI can provide accessible, personalized, and preventative health solutions so that women are empowered to improve their health, regardless of where they are. 

‍Increase convenience

AI-powered telemedicine and chat platforms enable women to consult with healthcare professionals from the comfort of their homes around-the-clock, reducing the time and effort required to seek medical care. Additionally, chatbots can offer a reliable and stigma-free platform for women and girls to seek medical support.

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Extend coverage

AI can help to ensure that patients are able to receive proper treatment, regardless of insurance status or financial ability.

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Empower self-care

AI can provide women with data-driven insights into their health, encouraging them to take proactive, personalized steps in managing their well-being and seeking timely care​ from their home.

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Boost research

🚨 Problem → Women were excluded from medical research until 1993. Even after that, many clinical trials continued to limit women or did not consider sex differences, resulting in treatments based on male physiology. Consequently, 64% of the most widely used interventions, like common therapies used to treat asthmatic, disadvantage women compared to men.

Consider cardiovascular disease (CVD): a 2019 study found that women represent only one-third of participants in CVD clinical trials, even though CVD is the primary global cause of death for women. Women of color are even less visible, where only 3% of women in global cardiovascular drug trials are Black. The most recognized symptoms of heart attacks, like chest pain and shortness of breath, are typical for men but not for women. Consequently, women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and sent home when experiencing a heart attack.

🤖 Where AI can help → AI can offer several solutions to ensure that clinical research and medical treatments are more inclusive and effective, considering the impact on women’s health from the very beginning. Per the NIH, a $300 million investment in women’s health research could generate $13 billion in economic returns.

Diversify research

AI models are only as effective as the quality of the data they rely on, yet much of healthcare still depends on convenient datasets and narrow research that reinforce inequities. To drive meaningful change, we must prioritize diverse and representative research. AI can increase women-focused health research by recommending more equitable funding distributions and encouraging balanced gender recruitment in clinical trials. 

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Identify gender differences

AI can analyze large datasets to identify gender-specific differences in disease manifestation and progression, leading to the development of more accurate diagnostic criteria and treatments. When datasets do not exist, we can leverage AI to create new datasets focusing on women’s health areas that incorporate women from different racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic backgrounds. 

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Risks of AI

While AI offers immense potential to transform women’s health, it also comes with risks that could impact ethical, equitable, and safe applications. 

1. Bias: Since AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on, existing inequities in healthcare data can perpetuate or exacerbate disparities. Historically, healthcare data has been biased toward male physiology, and underrepresentation of women—especially those from diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds—could result in AI tools that fail to meet the needs of all women. To avoid this pitfall, we must build diverse and representative datasets.
2. Privacy: Women’s health data often involves deeply personal information, such as reproductive health, hormonal patterns, and mental well-being. Protecting this sensitive data is crucial to maintaining trust and safeguarding against misuse or breaches, which could lead to discrimination or other harms.
3. Inaccuracy: There is a danger of over-reliance on algorithms at the expense of human judgment. While AI can enhance diagnostic accuracy and treatment personalization, it cannot replace the empathy and nuanced understanding of healthcare providers. “Black-box” AI systems—where decisions lack clear reasoning—can lead to inappropriate recommendations and erode patient trust. Instead, we need to integrate careful monitoring and human oversight.

By addressing these challenges thoughtfully, we can advance women’s health while ensuring the highest standards of equity, ethics, and patient care.

What’s Next?

Integrating AI into women's health can address long-standing disparities and improve health outcomes for women globally. But, this potential can only be realized with substantial investment and support. 

If you are launching a startup in women's health or know an entrepreneur seeking funding, reach out to us (shailee@luxcapital.com)! We are obsessed with connecting with passionate founders and exploring potential opportunities for collaboration.

Women’s health represents a huge opportunity for innovation and impact. The time to act is long overdue, but it’s essential we start now.