Women's Health Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Play Health is building a perimenopause care platform to provide women and their providers with the tools they need to relieve symptoms fast. It is led by technical, second-time, YC-backed founders Andrea Mazzocchi, PhD and Ian Miller, with an exit and a unicorn between them. Over 30 million women in the U.S. are experiencing perimenopause symptoms, spending an estimated $15B+ annually on symptom management. Despite this most only receive generic solutions and struggle to find effective symptom relief. We're bringing evidence-based perimenopause care to women through partnerships with medical practices and employer and health benefits programs. Our platform integrates personalized symptom, medication, and lifestyle data to generate AI-powered insights and clinical protocols, enabling providers to deliver specialized care. Every clinical interaction enriches our longitudinal dataset allowing us to create better outcomes for patients, deeper insights for providers, and expand into women’s health broadly. This also enables us to partner with pharma and biotech companies developing therapeutics and diagnostics for women's health.

Over 80% of maternal mortalities were preventable with earlier intervention. Currently, doctors miss >50% of moms who have life-threatening complications and wait until labor to start doing manual risk assessments, at which point it's too late. Elythea's proprietary ML models catch life-threatening obstetric complications (like postpartum hemorrhage, preeclampsia/eclampsia, emergency c-section, preterm labor, and more) as soon as the first visit. We automatically analyze relevant demographic and clinical risk factors, flag high-risk patients, and provide evidence-based interventions, giving doctors months in advance to intervene and prevent complications from ever happening. Our global clinical studies have shown that we can catch 3x more complications than clinical judgment 10x sooner.

Loula is a software platform and national provider network for independent birth & postpartum doulas to boost their practices by accepting health insurance. Doulas typically operate outside of the traditional healthcare system and face an enormous learning curve and administrative burden when trying to accept insurance. This is why we created Loula. Starting with doulas in California, Loula handles their credentialing, contracting, and revenue cycle management so that they can focus on delivering the best quality care to their clients.

Syrona Health’s innovative add on benefit is designed to address the critical gaps in women’s health coverage by integrating fertility, menopause, and female-specific cancer care , men's health and trans/nonbinary health. Our solution directly tackles the escalating $30B in out-of-pocket healthcare costs by offering financial protection for treatments often excluded or poorly covered by traditional health insurance.

Liv Labs (@livlabsfitness) is a US-based, Y Combinator-backed women's wellness innovator. 78 million American women live with pelvic floor weakness and 31M worry daily about leaking. Liv Labs is commercializing the patented Pippa Resistance Spring to boost fitness during exercise and semi-automated self-care coaching to keep them strong and active, lifelong. First orders shipped October 11, 2025. Pippa inventor, Carly Price, reimagined the humble pillow for Casper and has 41 patents to her name. Company CEO, Melody Roberts, incubated digital service experiences now scaling globally at McDonald's and Panera. Pippa development has been substantially funded by non-dilutive SBIR grants from NIH, NSF, and State of Illinois, based on stellar product effectiveness data and user feedback like, "With this, surgery is off the table." 

Matrubials is an anti-infectives company, focused on human milk peptides as therapeutics to address antimicrobial resistance and modern diseases. Currently the global rise in severe bacterial infections and the drying pipeline of effective treatments are burdensome for healthcare and economics. Sculpted by evolution, milk, first food for the newborn, provides an exemplary solution to address the nutritive and protective challenges an infant is faced with. The anti-pathogenic molecules from milk can be developed into therapeutics geared towards all-age diseases. Our first indication is bacterial vaginosis, a bacterial dysbiosis related inflammation that results in recurrent infections, disruption of homeostasis and long-term clinical complications in women of reproductive age, including but not limited to preterm births, fertility issues and increased rates of STDs. Our next inflection point is the evaluation of rapidly acting and selective candidate peptides in pre-clinical host impact and early safety studies, which can aid clinical and portfolio development towards topical applications.

AOA Dx is developing the next frontier in early-stage cancer detection for women through our pioneering work in glycolipids and proprietary biomarker technology.

We help healthcare providers treat their gastrointestinal patients with AI-delivered therapy. Using machine learning and large language models, we learn from therapy data, outcomes, and physiology to deliver adaptive, scalable treatments for conditions like IBS - without the waitlist.

We're a women’s health company making personalized reproductive health information more accessible, earlier in life. We make the same laboratory tests that were previously confined to fertility clinics more accessible for women at home. By arming women with powerful information about their reproductive health, Modern Fertility is closing the fertility information gap and enabling women to own the decisions impacting their bodies and futures. We've raised $22 million from Forerunner Ventures, Maveron, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, #Angels and Y Combinator.

We aim to support and promote women who are creating wonderful and beautiful things. We hope to offer a trusted destination that will give you a moment's rest and a bit of laughter in our constantly on-the-go, work-driven world. Our dream is that every time you want to smile and add a little bit of delight to your day, you come to women.com. And when that smile carries over into the rest of your life and world, you share how good you feel with everyone around you. Pass it on. Our current website offers a personality quiz platform, trivia quizzes and a closed Q & A community.