When my friend Ryan Perlowin recommended that I connect with Aunt Flow founder Claire Coder, I was thrilled. Ryan backs visionary women-led companies, and Aunt Flow is a brand I've long admired.

My conversation with Claire was reinforced everything I believe about category creation. It reminded me why the best founders refuse to fit into pre-existing boxes

Earlier this year, I wrote about how Silicon Valley's obsession with femtech is lazy and incomplete. It's energizing to revisit this topic with insights from someone actively changing the narrative.

Quick announcement: Paid tiers are live! Subscribe for an exclusive Q&A with Claire covering the hardest trade-offs she made, the data that validated her thesis, and the one piece of advice she wishes investors understood about building outside traditional categories..

When Claire Coder started raising money for Aunt Flow, she had a problem that shouldn't have been a problem: her company didn't fit neatly into a box.

Hardware, but not IoT-enabled. Branded product, but not CPG. B2B, but not SaaS. Women's health, but not femtech.

And that's exactly why most femtech VCs passed.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth about venture capital: an industry built on the promise of disruption and contrarian thinking has become one of the most conformist ecosystems in business. Everyone talks about backing the "non-obvious.”  That is, until something actually non-obvious shows up at their door.

Aunt Flow eventually raised their Series A round from JLL Spark, a proptech fund. Not a femtech fund. Not a consumer health fund. A fund focused on the future of commercial real estate and facility management.

Why? Because they saw what the "women's health experts" missed: accessible period care isn't a women's issue. It's an infrastructure issue.

And the data unequivocally backs this up:

➡ 98% of students believe period products should be offered for free on campus.
Yet 38% sometimes struggle to afford them.

➡ 62% of facilities still don't provide free period care products.
And the leading reason (36%) isn't budget. It's that they never considered it.

Not because it's unimportant. Not because it's expensive. But because it was invisible. Just like the 800 million people globally who menstruate were invisible in product design, clinical trials, and yes, venture capital.

This is the same invisibility that keeps 99% of healthcare R&D away from non-reproductive women's health. The same invisibility that leaves women 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack.

So what does this mean for operators, investors, and founders looking for where to place their next bet?

Here are 5 lessons from Aunt Flow's journey that apply far beyond period care:

1️⃣ Women's issues are infrastructure problems in disguise.
Aunt Flow succeeded by reframing accessible period care from a "nice-to-have femtech product" to essential facility infrastructure. The same lens applies to postpartum cardiovascular monitoring, menopause symptom tracking in workplace benefits, and sex-specific algorithms in wearables.

Stop asking "Is this femtech?" Start asking "What infrastructure are we building?"

2️⃣ Pattern matching kills contrarian bets.
VCs claim to want disruption, but the funding data tells a different story. When a company doesn't fit the existing boxes, most investors walk away. The winners are the ones who create new categories instead of forcing themselves into old ones.

Aunt Flow raised from proptech because they defined their own category.

3️⃣ The data exists. People just aren't looking at it.
98% of students want free period products on campus. 62% of facilities don't provide them. The gap isn't information. It's attention. The most overlooked opportunities in healthcare aren't hiding. They're in plain sight, backed by robust data that no one has bothered to read.

If you want alpha, start by reading the studies everyone else ignores.

4️⃣ "We never considered it" is a $100B market signal.
When 36% of facility managers say they haven't implemented period care because they "never considered it." This is the mythical “blue ocean” opportunity that investors dream of. The best innovations don't compete for mindshare, they create it from scratch.

Find the "we never considered it" gaps in your space.

5️⃣ Women aren't a vertical. They're half the market.
The biggest opportunities in women's health won't come from funds that only invest in "femtech." They'll come from investors who realize women's health touches everything: proptech, workplace benefits, diagnostics, AI, hardware, infrastructure. Stop treating women's needs as a separate category. Start treating them as foundational to every category.

Aunt Flow didn't win by playing the femtech game. They won by refusing to.

Send this to anyone who needs data to justify tampons in the office ⬇

📎 Flow Forward NJ Study
📎 ISSA Facility Management Study on Period Care Access

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Why they matter: LOLA raised $35M in Series B funding and was acquired by Procter & Gamble in 2021, validating the market for organic, transparent period care products. They started direct-to-consumer before expanding into retail partnerships with Target and Walmart, proving that customers will pay premium prices for clean ingredients and supply chain transparency.

The opportunity: While Aunt Flow focused on B2B facility infrastructure, LOLA captured the D2C and retail channel with subscription models and brand positioning around ingredient transparency. Their acquisition by P&G signals that legacy CPG recognizes period care innovation as a legitimate growth category, not just a niche play.

Why they matter: Inne (Netherlands-based) raised €3.5M in seed funding to build the first at-home hormone tracking mini-lab. Their device measures progesterone levels through saliva samples, giving women real-time fertility and cycle insights without relying on temperature predictions or self-reported symptoms—actual hormone data.

The opportunity: Inne is building biochemical infrastructure for women's health. They're proving that the next generation of women's health "wearables" won't just track; they'll test. By making hormone monitoring accessible outside clinical settings, they're creating a new category at the intersection of at-home diagnostics and cycle tracking, with applications beyond fertility into menopause, PCOS management, and hormone therapy optimization.

Why they matter: Oura raised $100M at a $2.55B valuation in 2023 and has become the leading health wearable despite originally being built for male athletes and biohackers. Today, women are the majority of Oura users: drawn to cycle tracking, readiness scores, and sleep optimization features that acknowledge hormonal fluctuations rather than treating them as data noise.

The opportunity: While Aunt Flow had to reframe period care as infrastructure to find the right investors, Oura accidentally discovered that building for recovery and readiness (vs. performance and output) resonated more with women than the "fitness tracker" category it initially targeted. The lesson: sometimes the best product-market fit comes from listening to who's actually using your product, not who you thought would use it. Oura proves that women's health tech doesn't need to be labeled "femtech" to serve women. It just needs to treat women's health patterns as signal, not noise.

👀 My landlord story will be featured in Business Insider. If you know me personally, you've heard this story—but rarely in public. My hope is that it inspires others to take the leap, and more importantly, encourages a few folks to rescue beautiful historic properties. Details on thhe date the story will be published to come!

🎧 New Money Memories episodes are coming soon! Be on the lookout for supplemental newsletter issues highlighting guests and diving deeper into their stories.

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Till next week,
Ilona

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