Women make up roughly half the population, yet the research underneath modern medicine, wearables, and clinical AI was built almost entirely on male physiology. Clinical trials in the US didn’t include women until 1993 and the impact is compounding – up to 70% of women with PCOS go undiagnosed, endometriosis takes years to catch, and less than 4% of global health R&D funding goes toward women’s health, even though women drive 80% of household healthcare spending.
That gap isn’t closing on its own, it’s being built into the next generation of health technology. Every wearable, digital health platform, and clinical AI tool marketed as gender-neutral is being trained & validated on men. As these companies race to build women-specific features, cycle tracking, hormonal insight, and AI-assisted care, they keep hitting the same wall: that there is no trusted, structured, continuously updated body of women’s health evidence to build on.
Enter Collective X: the evidence and validation layer beneath the entire women’s health ecosystem. Instead of every wearable and health platform independently trying to solve the same underlying research problem, Collective X vets and structures peer-reviewed women’s health data into a validated intelligence layer that enterprises can plug straight into their products. A digital health platform doesn’t need to build its own research team to know whether a “readiness score” actually holds up across a menstrual cycle, it can ask Collective X.
Collective X’s edge isn’t a smarter model, it’s a smarter foundation underneath the model. Every paper that enters the corpus is scored against a proprietary taxonomy by Dr. Stacy Sims and a collective of over 20 MD and PhD “Vector Leads” before it’s eligible to inform a single answer. Where a generic AI tool will retrieve from the open web, Collective X declines to answer when nothing in its vetted corpus clears the bar. It doesn’t just tell partners what the evidence says, it tells them what the evidence can’t say yet, and why.
We often talk about founder-market fit, and Collective X is one of the clearest examples of companies we have backed (with four women co-founders no less). Dr. Stacy Sims, Chief Research Officer, is a globally recognized exercise physiologist who directed research programs at Stanford, has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers, and built a 1M+ following delivering the message that closes Collective X’s whole thesis – women’s physiology isn’t a footnote to men’s. Alongside Stacy sits a commercial team that has spent their careers building and scaling the kind of consumer platforms Collective X sells into. Lindsey Abramo, CEO, built and led commercial teams through two acquisitions at POPSUGAR and Group Nine before running World of Good Brands (Well+Good, LIVESTRONG) to a successful sale, while Angelica Marden, Chief Brand Officer, rose from POPSUGAR’s earliest employees to President, steering the brand through its own acquisitions, and Amber Taylor spent two decades across MuleSoft, Amazon, and Nike before serving as Chief Digital Product Officer at Les Mills.
At the Anthemis Female Innovators Lab Fund, we look for founders building at the intersection of data infrastructure, category-defining research, and the systems-level gaps that are getting rebuilt into what comes next. Collective X is not simply building a smarter search tool for medical research, it’s building the foundation layer for the women’s health ecosystem.
We’re thrilled to co-lead this round alongside The Council, SoGal, Muse, Emerson Collective, and Segal Ventures, and to welcome Dr. Stacy Sims, Lindsey Abramo, Angelica Marden, and Amber Taylor to the Anthemis portfolio.
