When Flo, the interval monitoring app, achieved unicorn standing within the US, the criticism was swift.
It is a product constructed for girls and not using a single girl within the founding workforce. The feminine founder-sized gap appeared apparent.
So why hasn’t the identical scrutiny been utilized to Eucalyptus – a startup with 4 male cofounders whose development was supercharged by GLP-1s largely utilized by ladies?
The current $1.6 billion sale has been loudly applauded throughout Australia’s startup and enterprise ecosystem. And rightly so. It’s a landmark consequence for digital well being.
But it surely additionally highlights one thing VCs and the broader ecosystem are much less snug speaking about: Who will get to construct options for girls’s well being and may illustration within the founding workforce matter?
Because the solo founding father of Amelia Bio, a ladies’s microbiome well being startup, it’s not onerous to guess my reply, however in the event you can persist with my rationale, right here’s why:
GLP-1 drugs (cue Ozempic, Wegovy and many others.) are disproportionately prescribed to ladies. Within the US, ladies are about 1.7x extra more likely to be utilizing them (15% vs 9%).
That is the place it will get attention-grabbing. As a result of in Australia, weight problems charges are nearly equivalent – round 31% for males and 32% for girls, in keeping with the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
So, if medical want is roughly equal, why are ladies driving demand? It’s onerous to disregard the position of cultural strain. In actual fact, Australian GP knowledge exhibits that women are more likely than men to be using GLP-1s for weight-loss without diabetes.
Girls usually tend to be judged on look and extra more likely to really feel the load, actually and socially, of needing to be “smaller”.
No shade to GLP-1s. They’re clinically vital and life-changing for a lot of. I’m not a medical physician and misuse of GLP-1s is a dialogue for the specialists. However if you zoom out, the illustration issue turns into more durable to disregard.
The TLDR is that this:
Girls are the better proportion of sufferers utilizing GLP-1s but nobody noticed it match to have a girl in a co-founder seat, contributing to selections on the highest stage.
A system designed to do that
Is that this the fault of Eucalyptus’ founders? I don’t assume so. It is a system doing precisely what it’s designed to do.
Eucalyptus didn’t seem in a single day. It was constructed throughout a number of funding rounds, backed by skilled buyers, with boards and advisors shaping its trajectory.
At no level in that course of did anybody meaningfully strain the workforce to contemplate:
“Ought to we spend money on an organization serving predominantly feminine sufferers with out illustration of that market at co-founder stage?”
That silence is telling. And if we have a look at the funding knowledge to help that bias, it’s brutal.
In Australia, simply 2% of enterprise capital funding goes to all-female founding groups, in keeping with the Cut Through Venture Startup Report in 2025. Blended-gender groups do barely higher however nonetheless obtain a minority share. At collection B+ stage there was no funding to feminine founding groups.
A well-known sample
The overwhelming majority of capital continues to move to male-only groups, notably on the later levels the place billion-dollar unicorn outcomes are created.
So, when a male-led workforce builds a unicorn firm with multi-million greenback rounds of funding concentrating on ladies, it has a tragic predictability to it. The unhappiness comes from the female-founded innovation that has been ignored as a result of they didn’t have a “charismatic” (male) chief on the helm.
That is the place the talk strikes past gender steadiness for founders and right into a healthcare one.
Girls have traditionally been underrepresented in medical analysis. It wasn’t till the early Nineteen Nineties that ladies have been constantly included in medical trials. Even now, gaps stay in how circumstances current, how medicine are metabolised and the way unwanted side effects differ throughout genders.
Girls usually tend to have signs dismissed. Extra more likely to expertise delays in analysis. And extra more likely to be navigating healthcare techniques that weren’t initially designed with them in thoughts.
Once we layer that with a funding system that overwhelmingly backs male founders you get reinforcement of an present cycle. Male-led R&D, originating from male-led funding, to male-led firms, which are fixing feminine issues. Repeat.
AI spots the patterns
How do you measure real-world affect of this cycle in as we speak’s telehealth world?
For the sake of looking for a gauge, I requested AI to analyse critiques throughout GLP-1 platforms like Juniper and Pilot to establish variations in how feminine vs male customers describe their expertise.
The patterns have been:
- Girls have been extra more likely to speak concerning the emotional and psychological affect of remedy.
- Extra more likely to elevate issues about long-term security and unwanted side effects.
- And much more more likely to reference physique picture, strain, and expectation – not simply medical outcomes.
These usually are not fringe issues. And so they’re simple to overlook if nobody within the room has lived them.
Who designs and delivers healthcare merchandise issues. It shapes how issues are framed, what trade-offs are prioritised, how dangers are communicated and in the end, whether or not sufferers belief and persist with an answer.
To be clear, I’ve deep respect for Eucalyptus. The founders have constructed an distinctive enterprise. Nonetheless, the patriarchal bias at its basis is worthy of scrutiny.
Their distinctive achievements don’t exist in a vacuum. It’s some sensible founders constructing on cultural techniques, which incorporates who will get funded and who will get repeated help to construct. Proper now, that system shouldn’t be impartial.
The query is:
Why are we nonetheless funding males to unravel ladies’s issues, at scale, whereas ladies stay locked out of the capital required to do it themselves?
Till that adjustments, we’re lacking out on higher healthcare.
