Here is a question almost no one in venture capital asks: what if the products everyone loves, the ones that are easy to build, easy to fund, are easy to copy, and exactly the wrong ones to invest in?
Karen Berg thinks so.
As a partner at Healthy.Capital, she looks for the opposite: startups tangled up in FDA approvals and clinical trials, the kind of regulatory mess most investors run from.
Healthy.Capital tracks its portfolio companies on a six-part framework measuring cost savings, capacity, clinical quality, environment, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. And she treats regulatory approval (FDA, MDR, CE marking) as evidence that a product actually works.
In episode 161 of Women Disrupting Tech, Karen breaks down the specific criteria her fund uses to decide which healthcare startups are investable, why data scarcity is limiting what AI can currently do for women’s health, and why she thinks FemTech has settled for wellness when the underlying problems demand real diagnostics.
Hit play below to listen to the full conversation with Karen.
Why FemTech Needs to Move Beyond Wellness Apps with Karen Berg | Ep. 161 – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Karen has a specific complaint about FemTech: too many founders build a wellness app because it’s easier than proving something actually works. She points to three things that turn a great health idea into something Healthy.Capital could actually fund.
Clinical validation is a moat.
Securing a CE marking and pursuing FDA and MDR approvals takes time, lots of hard work and testing. Karen argues that putting this kind of work in separates a company from “easy to build” AI software, since competitors who want to copy the product have to spend years catching up first. Looked at it this way, the long timeline works in a founder’s favor.
Impact needs a number attached to it.
Healthy.Capital tracks its own portfolio against six dimensions: cost, quality, capacity, environment, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. It also reports the results publicly: more than 300 million euros in healthcare costs saved since 2018. Karen suggests that founders use a framework like this from the start, as a way to base product decisions on measurable outcomes, so it becomes easier to produce the numbers that come as a result.
Respect is part of the pitch.
Karen once walked away from a deal with an experienced founding team. During negotiations, the founders treated Healthy.Capital as “a pot of money” and dismissed the fund’s input. Technical skill got them in the room, respect could have kept them there.
Put together, these three takeaways do the same thing: they help founders build a company that can survive a regulator, an investor’s due diligence, and a hard negotiation.
Know a founder who wants to build something in healthcare that goes beyond wellness? Share the episode with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 02:47 | Karen Berg’s background |
| 03:44 | Karen’s transition from finance to healthcare |
| 04:56 | Impact of personal loss and career change |
| 06:12 | Attraction to complex, regulated markets |
| 08:38 | Experience with her brother’s illness and sabbatical |
| 11:38 | Why healthcare and impact matter to Karen |
| 14:37 | Investing in digital health and early-stage companies |
| 16:09 | The role of AI and data in women’s health |
| 21:48 | Bias, representation, and funding disparities |
| 29:42 | Defining impact and measurement frameworks |
| 38:58 | Women’s health as a serious, underserved market |
| 47:17 | Impact of societal awareness and education |
| 52:29 | The importance of diversity in investment teams |
| 56:33 | The debate: FemTech vs. HealthTech branding |
| 1:02:02 | AI funding coach for female founders |
| 1:03:33 | Closing remarks and where to connect |
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Karen’s mindset for complexity carries into how she talks, too. In the same conversation, she moves from systemic observations about bias and funding down to specific, very personal moments, sometimes within a few sentences of each other.
The sabbatical reflection.
After her brother died, Karen took time away from work. Rather than treat that loss as something to simply get through, she describes it as a turning point: “It’s a bit of a cliche but if you lose someone you always realize what is really important in life and what’s not.” That reflection is part of why she left finance for a fund built around impact.
A lesson in privilege.
Karen also talks candidly about her own blind spots, describing a moment where listening to the lived experiences of people of color and the LGBTQ+ community made her recognize her own privilege. It’s a rare instance in the episode where the systemic point and the personal admission arrive in the same breath.
Why women ask fewer “stupid” questions than men.
In a training session, Karen learned something specific about gendered communication: “women will never ask a question because they think that their question is stupid while men are just asking the question.” She connects that pattern directly to who gets heard, and funded, in a room.
What makes these moments magical is not only the self-reflection but also the hidden insights they provide to explain the funding gap from a different angle.
🗣 Which of these moments did you find truly magical? Was it what Karen learned from taking a sabbatical? How she reflects on her own biases? Or maybe the fact that women should be less afraid of asking “stupid” questions? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
The Quote from the Episode
"There are a lot of women dealing with male related healthcare items, so why not the other way around?"
— Karen Berg
Karen said this right after admitting her own gut reaction to seeing a man on a FemTech panel presenting a solution for a woman's health problem: why is he here? Is he just here to make money? Then she caught herself.
It's a small observation that goes against a bias that runs through a lot of FemTech, including her own. If men are allowed to build for men's health without anyone questioning their motives, the same should hold true in reverse.
If you know a founder (or investor) needs to hear this quote, use the buttons below to tell her about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Karen's episode doesn't stand on its own. What we discuss connects to patterns that show up across other episodes of this podcast. These three trends stood out.
AI keeps running into the same missing data set
Karen puts it plainly: "AI only works when there's data. And when it comes to women's health there's not so much data. So that's a really big and serious issue." That's the same gap Ida Tin named directly in episode 140: the missing continuous data set on hormones, and the same one Sophie van Dijk pointed to in episode 159, where she named FemHealthData at UMCG as one attempt to close it.
Wellness framing costs FemTech founders funding
Karen challenges herself and the audience directly on this: "when I think about wellness it's like, how many solutions are there for people who have problems sleeping, want to relax more, meditation, exercise, food, diet, mood tracking?" Her point is that stopping there costs founders the chance to solve, and get funded for, a real medical problem. Beata Wandachowicz-Krason made close to the same argument in episode 155: investors who might pass on a "women's issue" engage once the pitch is built on hard numbers and clinical data instead of a wellness or social-cause frame. Two guests, working in different corners of FemTech, landing on the same fix for the same funding problem.
What gets measured gets funded
Karen's answer to that funding problem is a number: Healthy.Capital has saved more than 300 million euros in healthcare costs since 2018, tracked across six dimensions including cost, quality, and capacity. Dr. Christine Miller raised the flip side of this in episode 144, arguing that many systemic problems, women's health included, stay unfunded because they're harder to measure. Karen's framework reads like a direct answer to that gap, an attempt to make women's health impact measurable enough for investors.
Looked at together, these three trends point to the same block: systems only act on what's legible to them. So, underfunding of women’s health may not be a matter of importance, but of the availability of evidence.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Next week, we’ll follow the lead Karen gave us and explore a MedTech solution that goes way beyond wellness: treating incontinence.
One in three women will experience some type of incontinence during her life. It mostly starts around pregnancy, childbirth, or menopause: regular events in a woman’s body. Still, the topic rarely gets discussed beyond commercials for pads.
In episode 162, I speak with Leonie van de Kamer, CEO and co-founder of Certain, a Dutch MedTech startup developing a tiny valve, placed in the urethra, that takes over the job of a sphincter that no longer closes.
In the clip below, Leonie takes apart the image that the pad commercials sell: smiling women doing yoga, living their lives while wearing a pad, every single day. Her answer to what those commercials leave out is the sharpest 40 seconds of the episode.
Listen to the clip, and if you'd like to hear more, subscribe below to find the full episode in your inbox on 23 July 2026 at 8:00 CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
In the end, our conversation is about how we can make FemTech investable. Karen’s answer is that to get there, FemTech needs to move beyond building just for wellness, and she lays out what that actually takes.
Solving a distinctive problem, associated with real data, using regulatory approval as a moat, and a quantifiable impact that turns ‘we help women’ into ‘we saved €300 million on healthcare cost’, gives investors a reason to write checks.
A founder who can supply that kind of proof, a moat that holds up and impact numbers that survive scrutiny, closes the funding gap one deal at a time.
Listen to the full conversation with Karen Berg on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Karen Berg
Karen Berg is a partner at Healthy.Capital, a venture fund that invests in digital health companies built around patient and consumer needs. Before moving into venture capital, she spent years advising corporates and financial institutions at board level, in roles spanning law, investment banking, company secretary, investor relations, and legal, on strategic projects, governance, and regulatory matters. At Healthy.Capital, she focuses on making healthcare more accessible and affordable through the startups the fund backs.
You can connect with Karen on LinkedIn.
About Healthy.Capital
Healthy.Capital is a Dutch venture capital fund that invests in early-stage companies that fundamentally reshape how healthcare is organized and delivered, with the goal to make healthcare more accessible and affordable.
The fund evaluates its portfolio using the Live Impact Framework, tracking outcomes like cost savings, quality, and capacity. In the episode, Karen references the fund's own impact report, which found that with every euro invested, it prevented €5.19 in costs elsewhere in the system. You can read the full impact report here.
Want to know more? Visit healthy.capital or follow Healthy.Capital on LinkedIn.
Listen to Episode 161 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Further Reading
For more on the broader trends behind this episode:
The women's health investment gap, quantified
The World Economic Forum's 2026 Women's Health Investment Outlook found that women's health receives just 6% of private healthcare investment, with 90% of that limited funding concentrated in only three areas. Read the report
AI's promise in women's health, and its data problem
Silicon Valley Bank's 2026 women's health investment report shows AI-powered startups in this space commanding valuations nearly three times the sector median, even as the underlying data scarcity Karen describes remains unresolved. Read the report
Why regulatory complexity in medtech is under review
The EU's proposed MDR and IVDR revision, still working through the legislative process, was prompted by rising compliance costs and certification timelines that stretched to 13 to 18 months for most Notified Bodies. Read the analysis
Leave a Reply