We Funded a Thousand Companies and Forgot to Build One That Stays

Written By David S. Williams III

We Funded a Thousand Companies and Forgot to Build One That Stays

How point solutions aren't supporting women's health outcomes and why we need consolidation to win

Suzie Devine

Aug 6

Only a few years ago, a woman came into a fertility consult with a folder.

Not a metaphorical folder. A real one, the accordion kind, and she’d tabbed it. There was a cycle tracking app with two years of basal body temperatures. An at-home hormone panel she’d ordered herself. A gut microbiome test. Printouts from a fertility coach she’d been paying monthly. Three different supplement regimens from three different brands, none of which knew the others existed. A sleep tracker’s export. Somewhere in there, an actual lab result from an actual physician.

She had spent thousands of dollars and two years of her life assembling that folder. She put it on the desk and said something I still think about: “Nobody has ever looked at all of it at once.”

She was right. Nobody had. Not because anyone was negligent, but because there was no one whose job it was. Every single thing in that folder came from a company that had solved exactly one problem and then handed her back to herself.

I used to think that was a healthcare problem. Ten years into building a women’s health company, I think it’s a funding problem.

What we actually built

Around 2019, I watched women’s health become investable. This was, on its face, great news. Women’s bodies have been a rounding error in clinical research for most of modern medicine, and suddenly capital, attention, and a real appetite to fix it were flowing.

But look at what investors actually wrote checks for.

An ovulation app. A separate menopause telehealth. A pelvic floor device. A UTI test. A PCOS coaching platform. A fertility supplement. A lactation service. A perimenopause hormone panel. Each one a clean, narrow, beautifully pitched wedge into a single moment of a woman’s life.

The industry has a term for this: point solutions. And the honest scorecard isn’t great. Femtech has produced several unicorns and not a single decacorn. Funding is contracting, not compounding. The category I thought would be the great correction in healthcare has, so far, produced an enormous number of small companies and very few durable ones.

But the number that actually stopped me is this one: the average employer now offers five or more women’s health solutions, and only 16% of them achieve any integration with each other. That’s Aon’s data, not mine. Five vendors. Five logins. Five intake forms. Five separate pictures of one woman, and no composite.

Aon’s own conclusion is the thing I’ve been trying to say for years, and honestly they said it better than I have: the solution can’t be more point solutions.

The part that isn’t just annoying

A woman’s health is not a series of unrelated episodes. It’s one continuous physiological story, and the chapters talk to each other.

If you had preeclampsia in a pregnancy, that’s not a pregnancy fact. It’s a cardiovascular risk marker that should follow you for the rest of your life and change how closely anyone watches your blood pressure in your forties and fifties. If you had gestational diabetes, your risk of type 2 diabetes climbs meaningfully for decades afterward. If you had postpartum thyroiditis, that matters enormously when you show up at 47 with fatigue and brain fog and someone reflexively calls it perimenopause. If you have endometriosis, that isn’t only a fertility issue. It shapes your pain management, your surgical history, your whole risk profile.

So which of the five apps on her phone holds that thread?

None of them. The fertility company offboarded her at her first positive beta. The pregnancy app went quiet at twelve weeks postpartum. The menopause platform met her fifteen years later with a blank intake form and no idea any of it had happened.

The peer-reviewed literature on digital health started saying this plainly: that tools built around single conditions carry a real risk of fragmenting patient care. That’s the clinical cost of the wedge. We didn’t just build an inconvenient market. We built a market that’s structurally incapable of longitudinal care, and then we sold it to women as empowerment.

Why it happened, and why I don’t think anyone was a villain

I want to be fair here, because I’ve been on the other side of the pitch.

A point solution is so much easier to fund. You can describe it in one sentence. It has a clean ideal customer, a legible wedge, a tidy CAC story, and a comparable. “We’re the X for Y.” Investors could underwrite it. Founders could explain it. It worked beautifully as a fundraising object.

The problem is that a narrow wedge can mean a short customer window. You acquire a woman for the eighteen months she’s trying to conceive, at DTC prices, and then you lose her, right at the moment she becomes most valuable and right at the moment she most needs someone who already knows her history. The economics were punishing the companies and failing the women in exactly the same motion. That isn’t a coincidence. It’s one flaw, viewed from two sides.

And I should say this plainly: I built a point-solution. Not because I didn’t know better clinically. I knew better clinically the whole time. I did it because a narrow product is easier to launch, easier to explain, and easier to sell, and when you’re small and tired and trying to survive a quarter, easier is extremely persuasive. Some of the sharpest lessons of my last decade came from watching a woman finish the thing I’d built for her and then walk off the edge of it, into nothing.

What I think comes next

Investors have noticed. The largest rounds in this category now go to companies tied to clinical, reimbursable, regulated, or infrastructure-like care, not to the standalone wedge. The market is correcting toward things that are hard to build and hard to leave.

I’d go further. I don’t think women’s health needs more solutions. I think it needs fewer companies that stay longer.

Continuity is the product. Not a feature you bolt onto a product, but the product itself. The value of knowing a woman’s history isn’t sentimental. It’s clinical, it compounds, and it’s the only thing in this entire category that gets more valuable over time instead of less.

And in the meantime, the burden of integration hasn’t disappeared. We just handed it to the person least equipped to carry it. At least an employer has a benefits team to sort through the five vendors. If you’re buying any of this yourself, you’re the benefits manager of your own health, unpaid, uncredentialed, running vendor evaluation at eleven at night on your phone, deciding which of six brands to trust with the thing you want most in the world.

That woman with the accordion folder wasn’t disorganized. She was doing a job that nobody would build a company around.

I think we should build the company. Not another one that meets her for a season and hands her back to herself, but one that’s still there in fifteen years, holding the whole thread, so that when she walks in tired at forty-seven, someone can finally say: I’ve got all of it. I’ve been here the whole time.

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David S. Williams III
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