THE GOLD RUSH OF MENO TECH
Death to Stock
By Liz Plosser
6 Minute Read
Midlife women are more visible than ever, and health tech firms have swooped in to innovate. The problem? Research and funding from the U.S. health system is still lagging behind.
I'm 47, squarely in perimenopause, and I did not realize how broken my sleep had become until I invested in an Eight Sleep Pod last March. On Autopilot mode, the temperature adjusts throughout the night, learning my patterns and preferences over time. A simple button on the side of my mattress can also activate Hot Flash Mode, which immediately drops the temperature to its coldest setting.
I spent seven years as Editor-in-Chief of Women's Health, and until 2024, menopause stories didn’t score too many clicks. For generations, women were expected to endure the symptoms and get on with their lives. Menopause rarely came up at the doctor's office, let alone at dinner or in a meeting. It definitely wasn’t a splashy topic in magazines.
Things have changed. Last year, The New Yorker declared that “Menopause is Having a Moment”, and popular culture in 2026 would back that up. Midlife women are appearing on runway shows, menopause is becoming a plotline in TV shows like Apple TV+’s Your Friends and Neighbors, while fitness brands including Peloton, Apple Fitness+, Pvolve and The Sculpt Society have introduced programs for midlife women. Menopause, once hidden and stigmatized, also has celebrity ambassadors: Telehealth company Midi Health cast a perimenopausal Amy Schumer as a guest lecturer in its first national campaign.
With this increased visibility thankfully comes innovation. Tech brands have woken up; they’re finally investing in products for women, and the launches are coming so quickly that it's hard to keep up. In contrast, the medical system is still playing catch-up. Research and funding remain limited, and demand for one of menopause’s most commonly prescribed and effective hormonal treatments—estrogen patches—currently outweighs supply. Women cannot get their hands on it.
There's a business case for all this attention. Roughly 1.2 billion women worldwide are expected to be menopausal by 2030, about 14 percent of the global population. And consumers over 50 hold 72 percent of U.S. personal wealth. The world—and by that I also mean venture capitalists—has woken up to the fact that the menopause is a natural, unavoidable experience that women will navigate. They were sleeping on a huge opportunity.
And we want to feel better, dammit!
THE RESEARCH GAP STILL EXISTS
Funding hasn’t caught up with the enthusiasm. A National Academies analysis found that just 8.8 percent of NIH grant spending from 2013 to 2023 went to women's health research. By 2023, that share had slipped below 8 percent. Menopause gets a sliver of that sliver. Dr. Susan Reed, a past president of The Menopause Society, has estimated that less than 1 percent of NIH women's health funding goes to menopause research.
And then there’s estrogen. For more than two decades, hormone therapy carried “black box” warnings about breast cancer, cardiovascular disease and dementia. It was a detrimental reaction to a 2002 study that was widely misinterpreted by legacy media headlines, but with huge impact: women were suffering the menopause without treatment. Last November, the FDA began removing those warnings. Women responded. Use of estrogen patches jumped 26 percent through February.
That was good news, but what happened next is not. The FDA has not officially declared a shortage, but manufacturers are scrambling to meet the demand. In September, the agency acknowledged its working with six pharmaceuticals to increase supply; in October, the shortage became a conversation for Congress.
There’s also a lack of specialists. The U.S. has more than 49,000 OB-GYNs, yet fewer than 4,500 Menopause Society Certified Practitioners. Doctors and scientists including Mary Claire Haver, Jessica Shepherd, Kelly Casperson and Vonda Wright have turned their knowledge into public empires to plug the gap. They’ve built podcasts and social media followings, they’ve written books and hosted summits—all because the U.S. health system has so little infrastructure in place.
THE MENOPAUSE GOLD RUSH
The result of this absence? Menopause has become a commercial enterprise. Health tech companies are moving into that white space, generating data of their own from millions of nights of sleep and billions of scale readings. Some are funding studies outright. Commercial businesses are effectively stepping in where healthcare is failing women, and they’re offering solutions of sorts—for a price.
Midi Health, the women’s-focused telehealth company focusing on perimenopause and menopause care, has since expanded its offering into wellbeing supplements that cater to a healthy lifestyle and support a woman holistically. It raised $100 million in February, receiving a valuation north of $1 billion. Distilled into facts: Midi Health became a unicorn built on the reality that millions of women weren’t getting the midlife care they needed from the United States’s healthcare system.
Meanwhile, tech firms are unveiling gadgets and trackers to help women monitor their symptoms, and ideally, bring data to their doctors for support and treatment. On a weekly basis, I’m inundated with launches. Here are a few that have caught my eye.
FOR THE BEDROOM: Eight Sleep's Pod is a temperature-regulating mattress cover, and in 2025 the company added Hot Flash Mode as part of a multiyear Women's Sleep Initiative. A tap on the cover or in the app rapidly cools that side of the bed, then eases the temperature back to baseline so the sleeper can drift off again.
In a two-week company study of 16 menopausal women, 80 percent reported relief within 10 minutes. "It's time to use technology to solve women's sleep challenges," said Alexandra Zatarain, Eight Sleep's co-founder, who announced the feature as the company's first step into women's health.
FOR THE BATHROOM: Withings has amassed one of the world's largest data sets on midlife women. Its Menopause Transition 2026 report drew on 2.5 million women in 11 countries and makes a compelling case for looking at menopause through the lens of cardiovascular health.
Among U.S. users, atrial fibrillation rose 3.8-fold across the transition. Visceral fat and blood pressure started climbing in women's early 40s, yet nearly half didn't log perimenopause in the app until age 50 or later. The new Body Scan 2 scale ($599.95) incorporates those midlife shifts into its guidance.
THE APPAREL: Petal, which began shipping this month ($199 at preorder), is a soft insert that sits inside a bra. It uses ECG and bioimpedance sensors on the chest to track heart rate and estimate visceral fat, mobility and balance, with algorithms trained on female-only data. Its chest-based positioning enables it to capture hormonal and physiological data other wearables miss. For example, fluctuating hormones can cause fluid retention and changes in breast tissue. Petal’s device helps women understand whether it’s actual weight gain, or hormonal water retention.
THE WEARABLES: The biggest wearable brands are investing in midlife health, too. Oura (which launched its IPO this month), Whoop and Apple have all introduced features for the midlife years, incorporating perimenopause into apps millions of women already check every morning; Apple added perimenopause and menopause tracking to Cycle Tracking, empowering women to connect the dots between their cycle and their symptoms.
New upstarts are launching, too. Clair, founded by Stanford graduates Jenny Duan and Abhinav Agarwal, claims to be the first continuous hormone tracker, and it aims to monitor women’s hormones without a needle. The wrist wearable measures physiological signals to estimate changes in estrogen, progesterone and other hormones, which oscillate wildly during perimenopause. Clair has raised $11.6 million and plans to ship its first devices to Founding Members in December.
WHAT’S NEXT?
I'm still trying to square this middle ground we are in. We have a bra that can track heart signals, a mattress that responds to a hot flash and a startup working to read hormonal shifts from our wrists, but we can’t get our hands on simple medication like estrogen patches from our doctors. The commercial world is answering needs that corporate American healthcare is not.
That said, the technology still excites me. For me, the proof is in my sleep. I look forward to getting into bed every night because I know I'll be comfortable and wake up rested. I once dreamed of putting a menopause coverline on the magazine. The moment is here, and it’s feeling more like a movement.
What a time to be perimenopausal.
