Naseem Sayani launched Emmeline Ventures in January 2022 with two missions: to help back more women founders and to hire more women and people of color as decision-making fund managers. She is part of an increasing number of women and people of color whose mission is to change the dire state of funding for marginalized groups.
Before starting Emmeline, Sayani spent more than 20 years in leadership positions at consulting companies and incubators, working as an angel investor on the side, and she wanted to do something to improve diversity in the startup ecosystem. “I knew I was enabling the same people to get rich, instead of expanding the opportunity to build business and generate wealth to more people that looked like me,” she told TechCrunch+.
Her fund invests in women founders building businesses that help other women manage their health, wealth and environment. So far, Emmeline has 19 portfolio companies, including Clutch Wallet, Deux Foods, She Matters and Alloy.
Emmeline’s investment thesis comes at a pivotal time for women’s innovation: Funding for companies focused on women’s health has remained strong, especially following the overturn of Roe v. Wade — women’s health companies raised $1.15 billion in 2022, a slight dip from the $1.26 billion they raised in 2021 but much higher than the $466 million picked up in 2020.
I caught up with Sayani to talk about her investment thesis, the future of fintech and what’s next.
(Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Nearly everyone is dismayed with the U.S. healthcare system and would love alternatives. As you increase your focus on health companies, is it better to invest in companies that are working inside the U.S. healthcare system or outside?
We need companies we invest in to be doing both.
Healthcare’s existing infrastructure does not move fast enough for rich innovation and is riddled with biases that need rewriting and undoing. But these systems are still the core of how health benefits are delivered and funded for a vast majority of the population. New startups are better served launching outside the current system so that they can create new datasets, activate new modes of delivery, and target new use cases more quickly and with more precision.
And they need to build wiring into existing healthcare systems to drive provider adoption, ensure coverage, integrate new data and insights, and ultimately influence new and emerging care protocols. The worst scenario for healthcare is a dual system, one grounded in old solutions and one grounded in new solutions. Integration is critical for growth and scale.
Looking at this intersectionality, what is the importance of funding companies that serve people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds? How do you successfully target such a customer?
With digital technology in hand, the viability is tremendous. Telehealth and digital pharmacies, to name a few, are dramatically changing how we reach rural lives, whether domestic or international. Today, a specialist in Europe can review X-rays and blood panels for a woman in sub-Saharan Africa and provide care for her that was impossible in years past. This ability to scale access and care has tremendous value and should be funded. Business models like these require strong partnerships with local governments and the private sector to ensure sustainable funding and delivery.
Targeting these audiences comes down to trust and community. The reason one woman will access a service will rely on good word-of-mouth from other women in her network and community. Startups in this space need to demonstrate robust local partnerships — teams on the ground, NGO partners, community groups — to fuel access, adoption and deliverability.
How have sentiments regarding the women’s health sector evolved within the venture ecosystem since the overturn of Roe v. Wade?
They have, somewhat. The conversation around Dobbs’ implications on economic stability for women and private and public stability has become more top of mind. Many of the women most affected by that decision work in education, government, healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing and the care economy. If their access to abortion changes, their ability to work can also change, and ultimately, the foundation of corporate systems we all rely on starts to break down. Blue states understand this more acutely and are funding minimum wages and unemployment benefits to a much higher degree than their red-state counterparts.
With a significant amount of innovation also coming from more diverse populations, if the women and families affected by Dobbs can’t launch the startup they dream of or use the new startup they meet online, innovation is directly affected. Venture is starting to understand that federal policy and startup growth are directly connected, especially on issues like this.
You also look to back fintech companies that help women and their money. Is it hard to raise for a wealth-management company these days?
It depends. The market is somewhat tired of yet another pure robo-adviser or financial planning platform and is really seeking more cohesive solutions, ones integrating education, community, tailored insight and activation. Wealth management innovation can’t be just one of these anymore. It needs to blend all of them and point this at a specific audience that can be activated at scale.
Which tools are under-explored by startups regarding how they service women?
Asset management and portfolio growth, especially for first-time female investors.
Ellevest created this space, and there is so much more to do.There’s a real opportunity sitting in recently divorced women who are rebuilding their financial foundation once separated. Very often, their partners were managing all the money, and they are just now doing this themselves — and if they come from wealth, the potential to help shape their options is huge.
A similar opportunity sits with young families who are just building their finances and for a new generation of wealth. Current financial planning solutions are not culturally competent and often focus only on the currently wealthy; these innovations can all be applied to earlier-stage use cases where women are now more likely to be in CFO or co-CFO roles for their households.
Also, nontoxic materials and hormonal health. There are so many startups in each of these spaces individually, but none truly combine the two. Our environment has everything to do with how our hormones evolve over a woman’s lifetime, and from what we eat, drink and breathe, to what we wear and sleep on, the endocrine disruptors are everywhere. Women need this insight early on — teens and early 20s — to make better decisions about what they buy and from where.
And AI and women’s health is the biggest. There is so much attention and funding currently running after generative AI, but not much of this is targeted at women’s health. This is likely OK for the moment because the proprietary datasets we need for smart and reliable AI in women’s health don’t fully exist yet. Without this data, the AI will fuel all the same biases and will exclude the diversity we need to support better. The women’s health startups building right now need to make data creation a big priority and put AI on their roadmaps. And we need LLM options that can build on top of these datasets at scale and with authentic checks for bias built in.
This would be game-changing for cancer diagnosis, fertility, menopause and everything in between.