In this inspiring episode, Stiliyana Minkovska, a qualified architect, female-centered healthcare designer, and founder of Matrix, shares her entrepreneurial journey in the femtech space. Her work focuses on transforming healthcare environments and has been exhibited at the Design Museum in London.

Stiliyana's dream of studying architecture at the Royal College of Art took an unexpected turn when she became pregnant and questioned the highly medicalized and masculine nature of birthing spaces. This sparked the idea for Matrix—a digitally-enabled speculum alternative aiming to revolutionize gynecological protocols through women-led design innovation.

The episode explores:

• The uphill battle of being a solo female founder trying to balance social impact with making a profit.
• The crucial importance of protecting intellectual property through patents and trademarks.
• The roles accelerators, grants, and investors play in the fundraising journey for femtech startups.
• Maintaining resilience and authenticity in the face of challenges as an entrepreneur.
• Designing inclusive healthcare products centered on women's lived experiences.

Tune in to gain insights from Stiliyana's journey and be inspired by her resilience and innovation in the femtech space. Don't miss this captivating episode!

In this episode, we talk to Emma Murphy, founder and CEO of Eating Freely, a network training professionals in emotional eating treatment.

She candidly shares her entrepreneurial journey in the femtech space. As a world-leading expert on emotional eating and binge eating disorders, Emma describes how her personal experience with a friend's trauma inspired her unique approach combining psychology, nutrition, and coaching.

She recounts the harsh lessons learned from previously raising $300,000 in venture capital funding that ultimately failed. Emma opens up about the deep depression she experienced post-failure, but how reframing it as a learning opportunity allowed her to bootstrap her way to success with Eating Freely.

The conversation dives into the pros and cons of bootstrapping versus seeking outside investment. Emma provides a refreshingly honest perspective on the pitfalls of VC and angel funding that many founders overlook, such as loss of control and burdensome investor pressures.

Her wisdom reminds us that money management discipline and operating lean are crucial for bootstrapped businesses.

Welcome to FemTech Real Money Talks, a podcast about fundraising in female technology.

And my name is Elena Lipilina, I am a founder of Visible Sports and I am the host of this podcast.

Here we're discussing fundraising for startups in FemTech on different stages of their development, different markets, countries and different types of products.

We are going to speak with the start-up founders, we are especially interested in female founders. Also we are inviting investors, fundraisers, the representatives of accelerators, foundations and agencies that provide the research in FemTech and fundraising

Let's go!