Women’s health ‘proves itself’ with exits surpassing US$100bn

Women’s health exits topped US$100bn in acquisitions and IPOs from 2000 to 2025, according to new research.

Released at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, the research logs 276 exits and 27 billion-dollar deals, including US$27bn in transactions in 2025 alone, the biggest year on record for the category.

The report, Follow the Exits: Why Women’s Health Is a Smart Bet in Healthcare, was produced by AOA Dx, led by co-founder Anna Jeter.

Jeter said: “What’s new isn’t momentum, it’s measurement. We kept hearing from investors, ‘We’re just waiting for that first exit for women’s health to prove itself.’

“And we were sitting there saying, ‘But we know this one, and this one, and this one, and they were billion-dollar exits.'”

The research found most women’s health companies were never labelled as women’s health in the databases investors use to track markets.

Instead, they were classified as diagnostics, oncology, devices or healthcare equipment, even when products were designed specifically for women.

“When you look up these companies in PitchBook, they’re all segmented under equipment or diagnostics,” Jeter said.

“None of them are classified as women’s health.”

Jeter tested how well the industry understood the scale of women’s health exits.

“I went around to a bunch of people I knew and asked how many women’s health unicorns there had been,” she said. “Everyone said ‘none.’

“One person gave me one. When I told them it was twenty-seven, nobody knew.”

The largest and most consistent exits came from diagnostics, especially cancer screening and molecular testing.

Ninety-one per cent of exits were mergers and acquisitions rather than IPOs.

Repeat acquirers including Hologic, Roche, Labcorp, Abbott and CooperSurgical have built platforms through women’s health deals.

Separate data from global consultancy Kearney shows that since 2020, private investors have put US$34bn into women’s health, with nearly two-thirds going to women-specific conditions such as fertility and women’s cancers.

About US$13bn went into conditions that disproportionately affect women, including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disorders and mental health.

Jeter said: “The biggest misconception is that women’s health is a small market. And that it is charity.”