The North West attracted just £327,277 of more than £100m invested in UK femtech businesses in 2025. Or did it?
This piece initially started out as a Northern response to new research by law firm Mills & Reeve, which appears to reveal a stark regional divide in the UK’s growing femtech sector.
While the figures suggest investment in femtech has surged over the past decade, with the number of deals increasing from 18 in 2015 to 53 in 2025, it isn’t quite the same picture in the North.
Regional figures seen by Prolific North show London accounted for £77.2m across 28 deals in 2025, while the North West was recorded as attracting just £327,277 from a single deal. It’s a similar story in the North East, with a single deal of £411,000.
Yorkshire and the Humber appeared to perform better, attracting £1.92m across two deals, while the South West recorded almost £11.9m from six. Here are the figures in full:
But do these figures really tell the full story of what’s happening on the ground? As I put the above data to founders, investors and ecosystem leaders across the North to see if it tallied with their own experiences, a different, and perhaps more important, story began to unfold.
Some founders questioned whether the data was capturing all forms of funding flowing into femtech businesses, including grants and angel investment, which many early-stage companies “heavily” rely on. Others pointed to a bigger problem, as some businesses developing tech solutions for women’s health may not even describe themselves as ‘femtech’.
One femtech founder based in Manchester tells us that funding she secured for her business in 2025 appears to be missing from the figures.
The data led me to a different question altogether. Firstly, are we accurately measuring the regional femtech investment gap? And if we put aside the questions around the data, is there still evidence of a genuine regional divide?
What are we counting – and are Northern femtech businesses being missed?
‘Femtech’ is a term first coined by Ida Tin, co-founder and CEO of period-tracking app Clue, almost a decade ago to describe technology designed to address women’s health and wellbeing.
Since then, the sector which covers everything from fertility and menstrual health to menopause, diagnostic tools and medical devices, appears to have grown rapidly. But what counts as femtech turns out to be pretty important when trying to measure where its investment is flowing.
READ MORE: Inside the funding and scaling struggles facing a number of female tech founders in the North
According to information provided to Prolific North, the research methodology covered the term ‘femhealth’, together with a range of women’s health-related terms, with data sourced from public announcements and shareholder data from Companies House.
In terms of deals, no minimum value was said to be applied, while investor types included business angels, accelerators, crowdfunding, private equity and venture capital, as well as government initiatives.
Lucy Hope, founder of Manchester-based femtech start-up The Daughters of Mars, is “very cautious” about treating the regional figures as a complete picture of the market and deal flow in the North West.
Her business is developing a patent-backed bioactive tampon to medical-device standards, designed to support the vaginal bioactive microbiome during menstruation. She describes The Daughters of Mars as “unambiguously” a femtech business.
In 2025, her business received £75,000 through the Innovate UK Women in Innovation programme, just under £30,000 of further Greater Manchester Growth Fund innovation funding and around £30,000 of angel investment.
That is approximately £135,000 of investment into just one North West femtech company that does not appear to be included in the research.
“It is equivalent to more than 40% of the reported total for the entire region – and we will certainly not be the only company missing from this data,” she explains.
She believes some of the issue stems from a “fundamental classification problem”.
“The research identifies femtech companies through website copy and company descriptions, but in my experience science-led women’s health businesses do not necessarily describe themselves primarily as ‘femtech’.”
She argues the “same distortion runs through the funding system”.
“‘Femtech’ or ‘women’s health’ is frequently not available as a category when I apply for grants or submit a deck through an investment platform. The options are more likely to be consumer, biotechnology, life sciences, medtech, healthcare or advanced materials.
“Founders are not necessarily choosing to obscure their sector. Sometimes the tick-box form simply requires us to describe it as something else because femtech is not an option. And placing your technology in a broader, better-funded category that is still accurate is survival.”
She isn’t the only Northern founder questioning what the data captures.
Dr Charuni Dissanayaka, CEO and founder of Liverpool-based AeraLung Technologies, also believes the data may not reflect the true level of femtech activity on the ground in the North.
“Seeing the North West capture less than 0.4% of UK femtech equity funding in 2025 – £327k out of £100M+ – highlights the heavy geographic concentration of private VC funds in London, creating a double disadvantage for regional female founders. However, I believe it does not reflect a lack of innovation or market demand in the region,” she explains.
She says early-stage healthtech and deeptech businesses based outside of London often “rely heavily” on public funding and grants alongside other forms of finance, raising further questions about what is captured in investment data like this.
Like Lucy Hope, she says start-ups building everything from women’s health medical devices to diagnostic tools are often tagged under banners such as ‘medtech’ or ‘biotech’ rather than ‘femtech’.
“This means a significant portion of regional activity might go uncounted, under different labels.”
Charlotte Lewis, commercial health lawyer at Mills & Reeve who specialises in healthtech and women’s health, says some of these questions mirror conversations the firm has been having with founders.
“Through our Femhealth Focus roundtable series, we have heard countless stories from founders on the challenges they face when seeking funding. Whether that’s something as simple as ‘femtech’ or ‘women’s health’ not being recognised as a sector category, to gender bias among investors and societal disparities,” she explains.
“While the market is shifting, there is still more work to be done. We need to better educate. Investment infrastructure in the UK lacks a deep understanding of women’s health solutions. The sector needs greater support to take something that is unfamiliar and translate it – not just from a healthcare perspective, but from an investment perspective as well.”
For Dissanayaka, there is still a regional funding problem to solve. While the North West has “world-class” life sciences capabilities and Liverpool has specific healthtech-related funding and business support, she says bridging the “gap” requires more Northern angel networks and regional seed funds to “step up” and lead pre-seed rounds rather than waiting for London syndicates.
“The most funding support available is for seed level and beyond, not for pre-seed, which is a key barrier, even for my company at this point.”
Is the picture more complicated than North versus South?
Andrew Feeke, corporate finance partner at accountancy and advisory firm MHA, agrees the figures don’t tell the “whole story” about investment in femtech businesses in the North West.
“The reality is likely to be much more nuanced,” he explains.
“As we know, the North West is a very collaborative place and the investment community, especially in Manchester, is so well connected to London that what may be happening is that some female founders and femtech businesses, and early-stage businesses in general, are being introduced to local and London funders where the early-stage VC funding environment is necessarily larger and more established,” he explains.
“This potentially skews the data to make it look like this M&A activity originated in London when the true picture is probably more complex.”
He points out that London is “always going to dominate” figures like this because of the significant scale of its early-stage investment market and infrastructure.
“From a demographic point of view, London is likely to have a more concentrated population of female founders and entrepreneurs than all other areas combined, so it’s not always fair to compare London to anywhere else,” he says.
“Of course, that doesn’t explain why the deal volumes in the North West are lower than those in other regions like the Midlands and East of England, but we’re not talking huge deal volumes in those other regions either. It could also be these regions are geographically closer to London and therefore closer to that early-stage investment infrastructure available there.”
He also cautions against drawing definitive conclusions from the raw figures.
“If the North West is genuinely lagging behind other areas of the UK in terms of femtech investment, then clearly that is a worry, and we need to understand fully what the reasons for this are and how we can change this. However, I’m confident there absolutely will be more investment happening in Northern femtech businesses, and in female founders across other business sectors, than the raw data suggests.”
Lucy Hope adds that she experiences that regional under-representation “constantly”.
“The concentration of investors, networks, events and decision-makers in London means I repeatedly have to travel there simply to access opportunities that founders based in the capital can reach on their doorstep.
“Manchester has the science, talent, clinical expertise and ambition, but regional founders are still expected to absorb the additional time, cost and friction of going to London to be seen. That is itself part of the funding imbalance.”
So is there still a widening North-South divide?
The questions around classification and coverage make it difficult to say with confidence exactly how wide the regional femtech investment gap is. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
When Prolific North put the initial figures to Dr Giovannie Jean-Louis, who runs Manchester-based healthtech start-up PROBr, she wasn’t surprised.
“They reflect some of what I’ve experienced as a female founder building a healthtech company in Manchester,” she explains, as she continues to build PROBr’s platform to make clinical research more accessible, diverse and representative.
“I don’t think the North West lacks talent or great ideas. From my experience, it’s that the ecosystem doesn’t yet have the same density of capital, investor networks and resources that founders can access in London.
“London benefits from an incredibly concentrated start-up ecosystem, and that creates another problem for regions like the North West, in my opinion.
“Founders can begin to feel that if they really want to raise significant capital or scale, they eventually need to go to London. Then you get this chicken-and-egg situation: investment follows founders to London, and founders go to London because that’s where the investment is.
“I think the North West should make sure that talented female founders can build successful companies from Manchester without feeling that relocating is the price of accessing capital.”
But there are different views on how developed the Northern investment landscape already is.
Courtney Ward, investor at growth capital investor BGF, says the North has established itself as a “major UK powerhouse” outside London and that more capital is now flowing into the sector.
BGF was set up 15 years ago to address a “structural funding gap” in the market and support the regional growth economy.
While Ward describes the investment landscape as “thriving”, she acknowledges there are pockets of opportunity, including in the femtech sector, where funding levels “don’t yet reflect the ambitions or potential of founders”.
“The research recognised that femtech deals are still largely seed and early-stage; however, we’d hope for this trend to broaden further in the years ahead, with a higher volume and value of deals,” she explains.
“The North has created the conditions for tech businesses to successfully scale from the region. There’s a deep and diverse pool of investors and funding to support innovators – especially those with a strong sense of purpose and the potential to drive positive health and societal outcomes.”
BGF has committed to invest a further £800m in the North over the next five years and is part of the Invest in Women Taskforce, which aims to address funding concerns facing female-powered businesses.
For Manchester-based Lisa Maynard-Atem, founder and CEO of LMA Consultancy, the first priority is understanding exactly what the data represents.
“There may well be a regional investment gap, and I think the wider question of access to capital outside London remains important. But to properly understand the scale of that gap, we first need to understand what is and isn’t being counted,” she says.
“That matters because data shapes the stories we tell about sectors and regions, and potentially the decisions that follow. If women-led businesses or businesses focused on women’s health are effectively invisible within the data, we risk building an incomplete picture of where investment is going, where the gaps are and where greater support or capital may be needed.”
While she says the growth in femtech investment more widely is “encouraging”, she says it remains crucial to have the data and definitions needed to “accurately measure” that investment.
Sophie Wilson, CEO and founder of Liverpool-based PR agency Tuesday Media, works closely with founders in the region and sees “incredible innovation every week”, from women’s health and diagnostics through to AI and digital health.
“If grants and angel investment are being missed, or businesses working in women’s health aren’t necessarily identifying themselves as femtech, then we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw from the data,” she says.
“There’s also a wider point here about labels. Some of the founders I work with are building serious health and technology businesses that happen to be solving problems predominantly affecting women. Whether they call themselves a femtech business or not doesn’t change the innovation that’s happening or the investment they’ve received.”
But she adds there is still a “conversation to be had” about regional investment gaps.
“But perhaps the first question is whether we have an accurate enough picture of what’s actually being funded in the first place.”
Two problems at once?
Perhaps the clearest way of understanding what’s happening comes back to Lucy Hope over at The Daughters of Mars, who says the figures may reveal two problems “happening at once”.
“The first is a measurement problem: at least one unambiguously femtech company and its 2025 funding appear to be missing from the regional data,” she says.
“The second may be an even larger economic problem: the North West possesses an exceptional women’s health research and clinical base, but comparatively little private capital appears to be reaching companies capable of translating that expertise into products, intellectual property, jobs and scalable businesses.
“Those are different problems and we should not conflate them. But both deserve serious attention.”
The data provides an insightful snapshot of a market that appears heavily weighted towards London and industry leaders repeatedly pointed to the capital’s continued dominance when it comes to funding, networks and decision-makers.
But some of those founders suggest some femtech businesses may be slipping through the cracks in the data, making it difficult to know just how wide the regional divide really is.
What is easier to see though is the frustration among Northern founders who know the innovation is here, but don’t always feel the investment opportunities are. And if some of those businesses aren’t showing up in the numbers either, the challenge isn’t just about attracting more capital to the North, it’s about making some of those businesses are seen in the first place.
