Femtech startup The Lowdown has secured $2.5m (£2m) in seed funding for its sexual and reproductive health platform.
The Lowdown is a contraception review platform for women to document and compare their experiences.
Alice Pelton came up with the idea for the platform after suffering extreme side effects from her contraception and founded the company in 2019.
“The Lowdown’s success speaks to how underserved women are worldwide when it comes to understanding and navigating things like their contraceptive options. Everything we do is about listening to women and building what they want because very few companies are really listening,” said Alice Pelton, founder and CEO, The Lowdown.
Last year the company expanded its offering by launching a contraception consultation service. Since it has gone on to provide sex coaching and pelvic health physios.
Based in Southwark, London, the startup provides digital tools such as a contraception recommender and a missed pill calculator.
The Lowdown says that its service is used by 70,000 women each month.
Pelton added: “Fundraising for this type of business is really hard. It’s rare to find a VC like Andrea with experience in building and scaling a women’s health startup, and I’m really excited to be working with her and the Speedinvest team.”
It plans to use the capital for hiring and growing across Europe.
The seed round was led by Speedinvest with participation also coming from previous investors Nina Capital, Calm/Storm VC, Entrepreneur First, Catherine Lenson from Softbank, Dorothy Chou DeepMind and Scott Mackin at Denham Capital.
Andrea Zitna, health team, Speedinvest said: “The time to invest in Women’s reproductive health is now. Contraception is just the start of The Lowdown’s bold vision in Women’s health and we are thrilled to be supporting them on it!”
Zitna will join The Lowdown’s board.
It follows on from the company’s $600,000 (£500,000) pre-seed raise last year.
Recently virtual fertility clinic Apricity acquired Woom, a period tracking app.
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