In this expert blog, Cross-Border Impact Ventures explores the investment case for women’s health: a sector that has historically been underfunded, but where growing evidence, innovation and investor interest are starting to converge.

Women’s Health: A Multi-Trillion-Dollar Health Opportunity

In 2024, two research institutions rarely known for hyperbole published a striking statistic. The World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Health Institute estimated that closing gaps in women's health could add at least $1 trillion to global GDP annually by 2040. Separately, the World Economic Forum has estimated that every dollar invested in maternal and child health generates roughly $20 in broader economic benefit, through reduced healthcare costs, higher workforce productivity, and healthier future generations.

Numbers like these tend to get filed under "impact" and left there. They shouldn't be. They describe one of the largest commercial opportunities in healthcare. They describe a category where scientific innovation, enormous patient populations, and institutional capital are starting to converge.

A market defined by scale

Women's health spans conditions affecting some of the largest patient populations in medicine: roughly 80% of people living with autoimmune disease are women, women account for close to two-thirds of Alzheimer's diagnoses, and non-smoking women are more than twice as likely as non-smoking men to develop lung cancer, according to Women's Health Access Matters. Each of these represents a sizeable, addressable market for companies building better diagnostics, devices and therapeutics, often in categories with less competition than more crowded corners of healthcare investing.

Cross-Border Impact Ventures (CBIV), a Toronto-based impact venture firm, has spent the past five years building a portfolio around exactly this thesis. The firm estimates its target sectors represent a US$625 billion market today, projected to grow to US$1.1 trillion by 2035, driven by advances in AI, diagnostics, medical devices and precision medicine.

Conviction is catching up to the data

"A couple of years ago, there was negative talk around impact investing," CBIV managing partner Annie Thériault told BetaKit, referencing the broader ESG pullback of the early 2020s. Her observation: many women investors and women-led foundations kept investing through it and reaped the benefits. The research Follow the Exits: Why Women’s Health Is a Smart Bet in Healthcare, documents 276 exits and 27 billion-dollar deals, including $27 billion in transactions in 2025 alone, the largest year on record for the category.

Thériault has reviewed more than 2,000 investment opportunities over the past several years. When she first began building the firm's thesis, making the investment case meant assembling supporting research from scratch, deal by deal. Today, that research exists in abundance, produced by organizations like the World Economic Forum, McKinsey and Women's Health Access Matters, and it keeps pointing the same direction: investing in women’s health is not about building on momentum, it is about investing in a sector that has overwhelming evidence of its strong capital efficiency, repeat strategic acquisition interest, and increasing exit scale over time.[1]

The pipeline reflects it as well. The first wave of "femtech" investing concentrated heavily in fertility and menstrual-health apps. What Thériault sees coming through now reaches into platforms designed around sex and gender differences from day one, targeting conditions such as autoimmune disease, cardiovascular health, central nervous system disorders and more. These are large categories affecting both sexes, where women are now being considered and designed for directly.

Capital convergence

Perhaps the clearest signal that institutional conviction is building: wealth managers who previously did not foray into women’s health now run dedicated briefings for their clients on it. Thériault points to firms like Ellevest and Morgan Stanley holding sessions on women's health for their women asset owners, a shift she connects to the ongoing transfer of wealth toward women and younger generations.

That shift shows up in recent fundraising activity, too. In July, CBIV announced a US$58 million first close for its second Women's and Children's Health Technology fund, on its way to a US$125 million target. Alongside returning institutional backers such as German development bank KfW, the Skoll Foundation and the Equality Fund, the round also drew a number of family offices and high-net-worth individuals investing in the category for the first time.

The returns underpinning that conviction are tangible. CBIV's first fund, which closed in 2023 backed 11 companies and has already delivered an exit: Sonio, a French AI-powered fetal ultrasound company, was acquired by Samsung Medison just four years after it was founded, providing significant ROI to its investors. Elsewhere in the same portfolio, Cardiosense secured FDA approval for a non-invasive way to monitor a heart-failure indicator affecting 1.5 million women in North America, and UK-based Daye's diagnostic tampon, which screens for HPV and vaginal health, has been piloted through the NHS with clinical validation across the UK, Tanzania and Nigeria. Altogether, the portfolio has reached over 379,000 women and children across 32 countries to date.

Why this matters for conscious capital

For investors weighing both returns and impact, women's health offers something rare: enormous, well-quantified patient populations; a deepening pipeline of scientifically rigorous companies; and institutional capital that is beginning to arrive at meaningful scale. The impact is also measurable through metrics tracked with the same rigor as any other portfolio metric, such as lives reached, so investors can see directly where their capital moves the needle on health outcomes, not just what it returns.

The bigger story of the last five years isn't really about any single raise. It's that an investment thesis built around roughly half the world's population, and the children who depend on the same health systems, is now backed by the kind of data, exits and institutional conviction that used to take decades to accumulate. The market sizing is real, the exits are real, and the investors moving into the category early are best positioned to benefit from having gotten there first.

[1] Follow the Exits: Why Women’s Health Is a Smart Bet in Healthcare – AO Adx exit report.