Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Elizabeth Warren has become a vocal critic of SVB's breakdown, celebrity-owned beauty brands are on the way out, and a VC firm is betting on women's health and sexual wellness. Happy Wednesday!
- VC opportunity. Founders of women's health companies often come to the category with a personal story that inspired them to address an underfunded or underresearched health issue through their business. The same was true for Carli Sapir, the founding partner of Amboy Street Ventures.
While she prefers to keep the details of her own health private, she says she ran into roadblocks in the health care system like misdiagnosis and ineffective treatments. But rather than found a company like many of her peers, the private equity alum decided to launch a venture capital firm.
Amboy Street Ventures closed its first fund at $20 million, Fortune is the first to report. The firm is entirely focused on investing in two categories: women's health and sexual wellness for all genders. "I realized these are incredible economic opportunities because they're solving major market gaps," Sapir says. "And I realized you get outsized returns by investing in this space."
Amboy Street has deployed $4 million of that fund with eight investments so far, backing startups including telehealth abortion access startup Hey Jane, vaginal microbiome testing startup Evvy, menstrual products company Aunt Flow, sexual wellness brand Dame, and audio erotica app Dipsea.
While several firms invest in women's health or focus on female-founded companies, Amboy Street is the only firm to explicitly invest in solely women's health and sexual wellness, Sapir says. She says she's heard criticism that her firm's focus is too niche—which she rejects.
"What most VC funds are doing is trying to predict future trends," she says. "What we're doing is trying to invest in companies that are filling immediate needs. We know these companies have strong growth opportunities."
Sapir says she is seeing the most deal flow in six verticals: maternal health, menopause and aging, sexual health and pleasure, hormonal health, abortion access, and LGBTQ+ gender-affirming care. Those verticals place some of Sapir's potential portfolio companies square in the eye of GOP legislators, who introduce anti-abortion legislation and bills that oppose access to LGBTQ+ health care.
"We think about legislation as a risk when we're making investments, but we also know that this is a massively underserved need," Sapir says. "And we know that solutions that are catering to this space will be major white spaces in the market and will grow despite legislation or restrictions."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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