Elvie Breast Pumps need Bluetooth; investors know why
When Tania Boler began raising funds for a wireless, smartphone-controlled device to help women strengthen their pelvic floors, prospective male investors were hesitant to speak. “We were talking about tech to put inside the vagina. It’s a very binary issue, so a lot of investors just wouldn’t even take the meeting,” Boler, founder and chief executive officer of Elvie, said in an interview. “They were completely uninterested.” Half a decade later, in 2022, sales of that product -- the Elvie Trainer -- have bolstered the development and launch of a high-tech $300 Bluetooth-enabled breastfeeding accessory or breast pumps called the Elvie Pump.
There are more products in the pipeline, and the company has since expanded outside the U.K. to the U.S. and China, and opened a sprawling in-house laboratory. The awkward elevator pitches still occur, she says.
Boler created London-based Elvie in 2013 alongside Alexander Asseily, co-founder of the once-popular Jawbone Inc. headset brand, and while attitudes have slowly improved since then, venture capital hasn’t as much.
In the U.S., for instance, funding for women-focused digital-health startups rose 105% between 2020 and 2021, to $418 million, Bloomberg reported in April. But female founders secured only 2% of venture capital in the country in last year, the smallest share since 2016, according to a separate report by research firm PitchBook.
Last year in London, Elvie closed a funding round of 70 million pounds ($94.2 million), one of the largest ever for a female-founded femtech company. For Boler, it’s a signal that technology designed for the female anatomy is at least “finally being taken seriously by investors.”
About one in three women will suffer a loss of bladder control at
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