🎉 Welcome back! Hardly recognize you there, new year new you?

We're thrilled to kick off 2024 with a student-led company that's redefining menopause treatment…

From my desk: My last week in Wisconsin has been enjoyable for the most part with more family visits and the celebration of the New Year. 

With my annual reflection of 2023, and planning for 2024, it's clear there's work ahead. So let's keep things moving here, and brace for the upcoming syllabus week…

Hailing from Belfast Ireland, this company is redefining menopause treatment through the combination of AI and wearable tech.

Kicking off the new year with a bang, let's shine this week’s spotlight on…

“Putting women back in control of their health.” – Feminatech

🎬 Behind the scenes

• Rolling with a team of five electrical engineering majors
  Lauren Fegan | Emma Stephenson | Kathryn Morrison
  Caitlin Mone | Zara Wilson

• Launched in the fall of 2022 at Queens University of Belfast

• Talks are being had with multiple healthcare institutions who are interested in supporting the team with trials in the future. 

• Financial backing was acquired from winning four pitch competitions

• Actively seeking additional funding for further product development

🌍 The Problem

13 million women in the UK alone are experiencing menopause right now, with many dealing with the emotional and physical symptoms on their own. 

This can be attributed to a historical lack of research on women’s health concerns and women being underrepresented in the clinical research process.

Pair that with the available solutions lacking efficiency and requiring women to manually input their symptoms.

1 in 10 women exit the workforce early due to menopause symptoms.

✅ Feminatech’s Solution

That’s where Feminatech steps in with their mobile app, M-Power.

M-Power combines the concepts of a physical tracker and a menopause app, going beyond just symptom tracking by integrating with users' existing wearable fitness devices to provide more accurate interpretations of symptoms

Key Features

• Wearable Tech Integration: Tracking heart rate, temperature, and sleep by syncing with users' fitness devices

• Symptom and Lifestyle Tracking: Allows users to input additional symptoms and lifestyle changes, like diet and exercise

• Personalized Advice Algorithm: Analyzes data to offer targeted suggestions for managing and alleviating menopause symptoms

• Community and Education Features: Includes a chat function for user support and an information hub with symptom insights

• Enhanced Healthcare Triage: Provides users with detailed health profiles for more effective doctor consultations

📈 Catalysts 

Overall, the Femtech sector is a growing market that is set to be worth USD 20.59b by 2030…

• Growing Market: The Global market for menopausal products is set to grow at a 5.37% CAGR from 2024 to 2030, driven by an aging population

• Valuable LTV: A rough calculation gives ~$1,500/user assuming they stick around for the average length of Menopause – (10.5 years)

• B2B Relationships: Feminatech is currently in talks with various potential partners

• Solid GTM Strategy: Studies performed by this group through their university give the team a target customer base of over 22,000 in the next 2 years

• Innovative Software: Their M-Pal algorithm finds the relationship between wearables data, the tracked symptoms, and lifestyle changes. to provide a proprietary approach to alleviating symptoms

🛒 Current Market

While menopause tracking apps are not a brand new concept, only one other company is utilizing wearable fitness technology in their approach…

• Midday (The only other firm using wearable tech for symptom relief)

• Health and Her ( #1 for menopause, )

• Balance (5 million+ downloads, launched in 2021, unknown daily active users)

Feminatech stands out in a market where most competitors are focused on users manually tracking their symptoms and are falling behind on incorporating wearable tech.

By integrating health wearables with clinical research on menopause, they have developed a unique solution that is currently only matched by a single new company in this industry.

Finally, according to a study from September of 2023, most of the current solutions on the market show a lack of quality content and functionality when it comes to certain areas related to women's health.

🚀 What’s next?

At the moment, Feminatech is working with software engineers to design their app. The first stage of development will continue for 6-9 months. 

Then the aim is to run additional trials to further improve its product market fit and functionality of the application which will bring us to the launch of the service.

Feminatech's post-launch strategy involves boosting direct-to-consumer sales via targeted advertising and offering its app to businesses. 

Revenue generation will allow further expansion into the entire mobile app market on any and all devices across the globe. 

💡Student‘preneur’ Insight

When chatting with the team about their experience as student entrepreneurs, a recurring theme was unearthed: the mentorship and funding opportunities provided by their school helped get Feminatech off the launchpad last year.

If you're a student considering launching a project or startup—go for it! You'll find people are more supportive than you might expect.

📸 Milestone Montage

• Queens University of Belfast (2023)

• Catalyst (2023)

• BelTech Award with Techstart (2022)

📫 Glad you stopped by, we hope you enjoyed it!

👀 Join us next week to get an insight into how a student from the University of Texas A&M is changing the game of golf, literally…

Speaking of golf, here's a dad joke to make you cringe…

Why did the golfer bring two pairs of pants?
In case they got a hole-in-one

–Owen