"Women's health is a no-brainer" – the €100m deeptech fund on the hunt for FemTech

Voima Ventures’ managing partner and founder Inka Mero likes to keep busy. Speaking to Impact Loop from her home in Helsinki, she's preparing to attend a Finnish National Defence Course in the afternoon. She’s also recently published a book entitled Kevätjäillä (English translation: ‘On Spring Ice’) featuring her poetry alongside photography from friend and colleague Harry Santamäki.

“Sometimes I have to do these side projects, because I think motivation in life is doing something other than just work,” Mero tells Impact Loop.

It's certainly been some busy years. The firm just marked six years of operation, and Mero went to LinkedIn to celebrate the anniversary and thank in particular the "1000 people working at the 40+ deep tech companies we are investors in, partners, co-investors, LPs who have trusted us and especially the special Voima team & advisors."

A deeptech heavyweight, Voima’s third fund closed €100m right at the end of 2024. The fund is still raising a little, says Mero, as LPs continue to approach them, though her long period of active raising for the fund is done. The fund has a ticket size of €200k to €3m ($227k to $3.4m), focussed on deeptech in the Nordics and Baltics. They typically invest in pre-seed, seed and early series A, with 30% of capital allocated to initial investments and the rest as follow-ons for the best performing companies.

It's time for FemTech

Mero says one of the sectors she and Voima are most excited about at the moment is FemTech – or science-based services that address women’s health and reproductive health in particular. This is a deeply underserved area, says Mero.

“Only 4% of all health-tech investments go to women's health,” says Mero. “Just a really unbelievably low number, which tells a lot about unconscious bias in this area.”

For Mero, this is an obvious social issue that needs addressing – with centuries of neglect thanks to a tradition of medical research focussed on male bodies - but also presents big opportunities for her LPs.

“When we launched in 2019, there was a huge gap in deeptech investing in the Nordics [compared to the US, China and rest of EU], despite the fact that we have the highest per-capita engineers in the world, best scientific research and world leading research institutions.”

Addressing this gap in Deeptech has been good for Voima in the years since, and “in a similar manner, investing into women's health is a no-brainer,” says Mero.

A long underserved market

Mero says that while womens’ health has long been underserved, the emergent solutions in FemTech – a market worth around €43bn ($50bn) in 2023 and expected to more than double over the next ten years – have enormous potential. There are headwinds for the market, of course, but Mero is also enthused by, for instance, the growing awareness among corporates and other large employers of the need to include health insurance and medical benefits tailored specifically to women in their employment packages, in order to attract and retain the talent they need.

Mero says she’s on the lookout for startups and solutions that offer real-time and non-invasive health monitoring for women, for instance glucose, metabolism or hormone monitoring via patches. She also says she’d be keen to see more FemTech opportunities addressing pregnancy and birth, as well as infant care, cardiovascular health and mitochondria.

Work to be done

Despite this enthusiasm, she also cautions that Europe needs to put far more work into building up the continent’s development resources and regulatory landscape, if it wants to be competitive. “We need to create a sandbox for European companies to operate very quickly,” says Mero, adding that AI-centred research funding needs to be developed for biotech and molecular science, as well as quantum drug discoveries.

At the same time, she says, the EU urgently needs to reform and harmonise the healthcare market across Europe. The current regulatory fragmentation between individual member states means, in her view, that companies waste far too much time and resources trying to play to every country’s rules. Compare that to the US, where FDA approval (even if it takes some time), means access to a market of hundreds of millions of people in one go.

“We have a great opportunity to drive these billion euro valued companies from Europe, within the European market. But I see that actually [what is happening is] Europe’s best companies do a little on their home market and then move to the US, because of market access.”

Despite those caveats, Mero is clearly bullish on opportunities in women’s health.

“We believe investing in FemTech is financially a rewarding opportunity. In addition to that, it has an impact, and it's important.”