BusinessHealth technology -- Girls uninterruptedFemtech firms are enjoying an investment boom. About time.A hormone called relaxin helps loosen up pregnant women’s hips.Without it, the pain of delivery would be unbearable.Its job done, however, relaxin lingers in female bodies for up to a year, when softer ligaments make new mothers more prone to injury, as Jessica Ennis-Hill, an Olympic champion heptathlete, discovered in training after giving birth in 2014.Five years later Dame Jessica started Jennis, a fitness app to help other women perform safe post-natal workouts.It now lets users optimise workouts for the different phases of their menstrual cycles, and has just concluded a successful funding round.Dame Jessica’s startup is part of a wave of “femtech” firms coming up with ways for women to overcome health problems specific to their sex.The market could more than double from $22.5bn last year to more than $65bn by 2027, reckons Global Market Insights, a research firm.Having ignored it for years -- in 2020 femtech received only 3% of all health-tech funding, and a modest $14bn has been invested in it globally to date -- venture capitalists are at last waking up to the opportunity.
