Canadian companies are leading in femtech innovation. But where is the funding?

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When Montreal startup Coral closed a $4-million financing round this spring, it was a win for Canada’s femtech ecosystem: Innovation in products that directly affect women’s health care needs.

Coral is a virtual clinic for women navigating perimenopause, menopause and midlife health. Users can access coaching, testing and personalized treatment plans from medical professionals while tracking their progress in the app.

Fiona Lake Waslander, Coral’s CEO and co-founder, launched the startup in 2024. After a long career in consumer technology, she sold her second business and was looking for something more mission driven. At the same time, she and her friends – who were all in senior positions in their careers – were beginning to talk about menopause.

“The lack of information was astounding,” Ms. Lake Waslander says. “No one knew what was coming.”

After researching menopause, Ms. Lake Waslander quickly realized that the lack of access to menopause information and care created a “massive glass ceiling” for women in the workplace, with symptoms like insomnia, anxiety, brain fog and heavy bleeding. “When that promotion comes up, you’re not anywhere on the thriving scale,” Ms. Lake Waslander says. “You are barely surviving.”

So, she and her co-founders Anna Chif and John McCalla created Coral. With the latest funding round, the startup’s total capital comes to $8-million, which Ms. Lake Waslander says has supported the company in expanding its virtual services to all provinces.

It’s a move that seems timely: In 2025, the McKinsey Health Institute published a report stating that Canadian women spend 24 per cent more time than men in poor health, and that by closing the women’s health gap, Canada’s economy could be increased by $37-billion annually by 2040.

“It’s a societal economic issue on top of a moral issue,” Ms. Lake Waslander says.

Addressing gaps in women’s health solutions

Tanya Lindsay was similarly inspired to found her Toronto-based femtech company, Aranexx, because of her own experiences with menopause. Aranexx is developing a wearable bio-sensor intended to measure everything from heart health to hormones in real time, while its app, Bastet Rising, allows women to track symptoms and treatments.

As a runner, Ms. Lindsay developed debilitating joint pain, exhaustion and nausea, but no traditional symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes.

“Even going up and down the stairs, I looked like an old lady, because I couldn’t move properly,” she says.

After several doctor’s visits for blood tests and ultrasounds where nothing turned up, Ms. Lindsay wrote off her symptoms as stress and over-training – until she suddenly realized she was going through menopause. After reading about hormone replacement therapy, Ms. Lindsay pushed her doctor to let her try it.

“Two weeks on these hormones, it was like magic – I was 90 per cent back to my normal self,” she says.

But the relief quickly gave way to frustration, she says.

“We can go to Mars, we can study the fricking bottom of the ocean floor, and we don’t know how to measure women’s hormones.”

Rachel Bartholomew is founder of Femtech Canada, a national network dedicated to advancing women’s health innovation. She says that historically, any investments in women’s health have focused on “bikini medicine” – breast, gynecological, fertility and maternal health. While those spaces are underfunded, major gaps also remain in conditions where women may be affected in greater numbers or show different symptoms than men, such as autoimmune disease, Alzheimer’s or heart disease.

However, Ms. Bartholomew says, “most of the people who control the money are never going to experience the things that we go through, because they’re men.” That means femtech companies start on the back foot, having to educate investors on what femtech even is, let alone their specific products.

‘Massive market opportunity for investors’

According to a 2023 Toronto Metropolitan University report looking at companies in Canada and the U.S., women-led startups see 35 per cent greater returns on investment, on average, than those led by men. Despite this, in Canada, women-owned businesses receive an estimated four per cent of VC funding, according to the Government of Canada.

“It’s this capital inefficiency that is a massive, massive market opportunity for investors,” Ms. Lake Waslander says.

That’s why Femtech Canada is part of a multi-province coalition pushing for Bill S-243, federal legislation that would create a national framework to coordinate, fund and improve women’s health research, training and care across the country. The coalition is also calling for a $400-million investment into a field that Ms. Bartholomew says has been neglected for decades. For example, Canada’s national women’s health strategy has not been meaningfully updated since 1999.

“I’ve never seen an industry with as much opportunity as women’s health,” says Ms. Bartholomew, who is developing a pelvic floor rehabilitation system as founder and CEO of Hyivy Health. “There’s so much work to do, so many opportunities to hit – it’s 50 per cent of the world’s population.”

In addition to Coral’s recent funding round, other homegrown femtech companies have scored wins in 2026. Calgary’s Flora Fertility raised $5-million to build out their fertility insurance model, which enables individuals to get coverage for pricey treatments such as IVF and egg freezing, while Kitchener, Ont.-based reproductive health app myStoria closed a $1.65-million seed round.

But while developments like these are promising, Ms. Lake Waslander says that the broader femtech ecosystem will need more investment to grow to its potential.

“The whole society thrives when women are at their peak,” she says. “An investment in women’s health just serves everyone.”