Antigoni launches as Canada's first femtech-exclusive VC firm

Roughly 1,445 of the companies in Brittany Barreto's database were founded by women. Fewer than 15 percent of venture general partners in Canada are women, Courtney Dragani, chief growth officer at The51, told the summit's closing panel. The panel did not dispute that the dollars skew male, and its answer was about who sits on investment committees.

"What we look for in femtech isn't different from any other company," Dragani said, "in that we want some demonstration that the problem is sizable enough, and that people are willing to pay for it." If the screen is the same one a generalist applies, the disparity has to come from who applies it, which is where she took it. "It's mostly men making the investment decisions," Dragani said. "But once you shift those numbers to 30, 40 percent of women in those decision-making rooms, then we see notable differences in terms of where capital flows." Getting from under 15 percent to 30 or 40 means at least doubling the number of women writing cheques in Canada, and closer to tripling it. Kristina Milke, a general partner with Sprout Fund, echoed the point.

The market figure on the table came from McKinsey, which estimated that addressing women's health gaps could spur $1 trillion in global GDP development by 2040. That is a GDP estimate. It tells an allocator neither the sector's revenue nor a fund's return. BetaKit's account of the summit does not include a fund size for Antigoni or a dollar figure for how much less women-founded femtech companies raise.

Barreto put the same gap to investors as a liability. A Canadian Institutes of Health Research report cited by BetaKit shows that as recently as 2010, fewer than 25 percent of health researchers accounted for sex in their studies. The same report found gender was almost entirely ignored. "If you're an investor, a stockholder investing in pharmaceutical companies that aren't looking at female-specific data, that is a risk to your business," Barreto said.

More deals and fewer dollars is the shape of the disparity Barreto's research describes, and it fits two explanations. One is committee composition. The other is stage and round size: seed cheques are small, growth rounds are where dollars concentrate, and a cohort weighted to the first will produce this pattern with nobody on a committee behaving differently. In my view the stage mix carries more of the gap than allocator identity does, and dollar-weighted data by stage would settle it; the closing panel worked from Barreto's counts. The summit gave allocators a company census and a research-funding share. Dragani's own phrasing left the return claim where it started: femtech "has the capability to outperform and we're trying to find what those pockets are to put our capital into," she said.