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90% of investors don't understand the demand for this $1 trillion industry – here's why

Investors are ignoring a huge subsection of tech because it’s considered “taboo” – despite the fact that it is set to be worth $1 trillion by 2027.

The FemTech sector includes all innovations designed to solve health issues suffered solely, differently, or disproportionately by women. It covers everything from health during pregnancy and the menopause, to Alzheimer’s and HIV.

Women make up more than 50% of the global population, which means the target market for products focusing on their health is massive. But just 3.3% of digital health investment in the U.S. went towards women’s health between 2011 and 2020, according to digital consultancy Rock Health.

And nurturing innovation within the female health space doesn’t just benefit women. 

Research by Women’s Health Access Matters, a nonprofit organization focused on funding for women’s health research, suggests that a $300 million investment into improving female health could generate around $13 billion for the global economy.

Research by Women’s Health Access Matters suggests that a $300 million investment into improving female health could generate around $13 billion.

De Agostini Picture Library | De Agostini | Getty Images

“The opportunities and the potential for value creation of investing in this area is huge,” Karen Taylor, research director of the Centre for Health Solutions at Deloitte told CNBC. 

“So I think if there was some more homework done by some of these investors, they’d understand why this is an area that is ripe for growth and investment.

“They just didn’t really get it”

Tania Boler created Elvie, a tech company focused on women’s health, in 2013 after she found a lack of products designed for new mothers. Elvie’s main products are pelvic floor trainers and portable breast pumps.

But not everybody took her new business seriously.

“To be completely honest, the tech industry thought it was a joke,” Boler told CNBC.

“They just didn’t really get it … [and] in quite a few women’s health issues, the problem is that because there’s a lack of education, there’s a lack of demand. From an investment point of view it’s not clear what the thesis is,” Boler said.

Personal understanding of a product is often key for investors, but the stats show that most investment decisions are made by men. A 2022 report by European Women in VC, a collection of senior female venture capitalists, found that just 15% of VC general partners were female.

Despite the barriers, Elvie has gone big. It is now one of the largest companies in the FemTech space and has a revenue of $100 million. There are examples of women who have run marathons and performed surgery while expressing milk using Elvie pumps, which CEO Tania Boler said highlights the human impact of investing in women’s health.

“We went with a very strong message of empowerment, but at the same time we tackle the taboos head-on, we don’t shy away from that. And that starts the conversation,” Boler said.

The issue of not understanding women’s health – and the importance of female-specific health solutions – has deeper roots.

“Because it’s been such a taboo topic, it’s really hard to overcome,” Valerie Evans, consumer investor at venture capital fund The Craftory, said.

“Not because [investors] don’t want to know and not because they’re purposefully ignorant, but I think it’s an overall societal problem that sort of permeates the investing world.”

And while the number of female investors is limited, the gender balance within company teams can also impact how difficult it is to get backing.

‘Being angry feminists hasn’t worked’

More than 70% of FemTech companies have at least one female founder, compared to the 20% average, according to McKinsey & Company.

But that means the odds are stacked against them.

Less than 3% of venture capitalist funds went to female-led startups in 2020, according to data from business school INSEAD, while female entrepreneurs are 63% less likely to get VC funding than men.

Deloitte’s Taylor said female founders also generally ask investors for less money than their male counterparts, which could be harming their prospects within the space. 

“There’s lots of research that shows women tend to be much more honest and play down what they believe is the potential for their innovation,” she said. “Men are notorious for big sales and investors are used to it.”

Economies will grow when women can birth taxpayers and not die in the process

Brittany Barreto

Founder and CEO of FemHealth Insights

For Brittany Barreto, founder of FemTech analytics platform FemHealth Insights, these figures emphasize the importance of startups taking accurate data to investors — so if they can’t appeal to personal experience (because the VCs are men), they can provide robust information.

“It was very important that we stick to the data part of all of this because if we’re just angry feminists, that hasn’t worked yet. So I was like: let’s be scientists and let’s be business people,” Barreto said.

And the FemTech sector is growing at an astounding rate. More than 60% of FemTech startups were founded in the five years leading to 2022, and there has been a 1,000% increase in the number of businesses in the space over the last 10 years, according to FemHealth Insights research.

Investors see growth opportunity in Femtech

These growth rates — despite myriad obstacles — are encouraging for an industry that has been struggling to gain traction.

“I am incredibly optimistic for the future of women’s health,” Barreto said, stressing the huge potential benefits for the world.

“The economic potential for countries if they can empower women to feel better, to live longer, live with more mobility?” she said. “Women have money. Economies will grow if we make women healthy.”

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‘Green light’ away from AI trade: Two ETF executives see a key market shift underway

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'Green light' away from AI trade: Two ETF executives see a key market shift underway

ETF Edge on signals of a new market cycle and top ideas for 2026

A key rotation away from artificial intelligence stocks may be underway in the market.

According to Astoria Portfolio Advisors’ John Davi, a broader range of stocks are getting a “green light” because liquidity is returning to the system.

“The Fed cut rates four times last year. They cut rates twice already. They’re going to go again whether its December [or] January,” the firm’s CEO and chief investment officer told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “Historically whenever the Fed cuts interest rates, usually that’s a turn of a new cycle. Market leadership does tend to change quietly.”

He lists the latest performance in areas ranging from emerging markets to industrials. The iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF, which tracks the group, is up 17% over the past six months as of Wednesday’s close. The Industrial Select Sector SPDR Fund is up 9% over the same period.

“I think they can be a good offset to what’s an expensive large cap tech position, which dominates most portfolios,” he added. “We’re living in a structurally higher inflation world. The Fed is cutting rates like, why do you want to take so much risk in just seven stocks?” and

Davi prefers a global balanced approach to investing versus an overweight position in the Magnificent 7 — which is comprised of Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla and Alphabet, which has been trading around all-time highs. The Mag 7 makes up about a third of the S&P 500.

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Sophia Massie, CEO of ETF-issuer LionShares, is also wary of going all-in on the AI trade.

“I think analysts have an idea of how much value AI will add to our economy. I don’t think we really understand how that’s going to play out between different companies yet,” Massie said in the same interview. “So, I have this sense that right now, we’re pricing in this probability that… one company may be the one that dominates, dominates AI and ends up being a big player in the future.”

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How Google put together the pieces for its AI comeback

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How Google put together the pieces for its AI comeback

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When ChatGPT launched in 2022, Google was caught flatfooted, but the launch of Gemini 3 and the Ironwood AI chip this month has experts raving about Alphabet’s AI comeback. 

Google kicked off November by unveiling Ironwood, the seventh generation of its tensor processing units, or TPUs, that the company says lets customers “run and scale the largest, most data-intensive models in existence.” And last week, Google launched Gemini 3, its latest artificial intelligence model, saying it requires “less prompting” and provides smarter answers than its predecessors.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff captured the excitement around Gemini 3 with a Sunday post on X, saying that despite using OpenAI’s ChatGPT daily for three years, he wasn’t going back after two hours of using Gemini 3.

“The leap is insane,” wrote Benioff, whose company has partnerships with Google, OpenAI and other frontier AI model providers. “Everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again.”

Most tech stocks were down to start the week, except for one: Alphabet.

Shares of the Google parent surged more than 5% on Monday, adding to last week’s gain of more than 8%. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed earlier this month that it owns a $4.3 billion stake in Alphabet as of the end of the third quarter.

Alphabet shares are up nearly 70% this year and have outperformed Meta’s by more than 50 percentage points this year, and last week, Alphabet’s market cap surpassed Microsoft’s.

All of this came despite Nvidia reporting stronger-than-expect revenue and guidance in its third-quarter earnings last week.

“You may be asking why almost all of the AI stocks we cover are selling off after such good news from Nvidia,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note Monday, referring to Nvidia’s positive third quarter earnings last week. “There is one real reason for worry and it is the ‘AI comeback’ of Alphabet.” 

But while Google appears to have regained the edge, its lead over rivals remains razor thin in the gruelingly competitive AI market, experts said.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Putting the pieces together

With Gemini 3 and Ironwood, Google CEO Sundar Pichai appears to have finally put the pieces together for the company’s AI offerings, said Michael Nathanson, co-founder of equity research firm Moffett Nathanson. Google is serving a broad range of customers from consumers to enterprise, something the company initially struggled to do after the arrival of ChatGPT.

“Three years ago, they were seen as kind of lost and there were all these hot takes saying they lost their way and Sundar is a failure,” Nathanson said. “Now, they have a huge leg up.”

The company had a number of AI product mishaps in its initial attempts to catch up with OpenAI. In 2024 alone, Google had to pull its image generation product Imagen 2 for several months after users discovered a number of historical inaccuracies. The launch of AI Overviews caused a similar reaction when users discovered it gave faulty advice, which the company later remedied with additional guardrails.

“There was a lot of fumbling, and they were scrambling,” said Gil Luria, managing director at technology research firm DA Davidson. “But they had the tech in the pantry, and it was just a matter of getting it all together and shipped.”

Of particular note is how quickly Google launched Gemini 3 after the spring release of Gemini 2.5, which was already considered an impressive model. The hyper-realistic image generation features of Nano Banana is another notch in Google’s belt. After the company initially launched the image generation tool, Gemini shot to the top of the Apple App Store in September, dethroning ChatGPT.

And after the launch of Gemini 3, Google released Nano Banana Pro last week.

Google’s ownership of YouTube and all the content on the video platform gives the company an edge when it comes to training models for image and video generation.

“The amount of video and current data that Google has, that’s really a huge competitive advantage,” said Mike Gualtieri, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research. “I don’t see how OpenAI and Anthropic can overcome that.”

Additionally, Google has successfully incorporated its AI models into its enterprise products, driving sales for the company’s cloud unit. In its third quarter earnings results last month, Google reached its first $100 billion quarter, boosted by its cloud growth. The company’s cloud unit, which houses its AI services, showed solid growth and a $155 billion backlog from customers.

And it’s not just the AI models. Google is also garnering attention with its AI chips.

Google says Ironwood is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first TPU from 2018. Google’s ASIC chips are emerging as the company’s secret weapon in the AI wars and have helped it notch recent deals worth billions with customers such as Anthropic.

After a report said that Meta could strike a deal with Google to use its TPUs for the social media company’s data centers, Nvidia saw its stock drop 3% on Tuesday, prompting the chipmaker to post a response on social media.

With the rise of Google’s TPUs, Nvidia may no longer have the AI chips market cornered.

“The advantage of having the whole stack is you can optimize your model to work specifically well on a TPU chip and you’re building everything to a more optimally designed,” said Luria.

The company’s ability to serve AI enterprise customers with its TPUs and Google Cloud offerings as well as its incorporation of Gemini 3 throughout its consumer products is driving Wall Street’s enthusiasm.

Experts who spoke with CNBC said the competitive landscape is broader than just one AI winner, but they added that it’s become increasingly expensive for multiple companies to prove success.

Tight competition

Despite these wins, Google is still in fierce competition with other AI companies, experts said.

“Having the state of the art model for a few days doesn’t mean they’ve won to the extent that the stock market is implying,” Luria said, pointing to Anthropic’s new Opus 4.5 model launched Monday.

Earlier this month, OpenAI also announced two updates to its GPT-5 model to make it “warmer by default and more conversational” as well as “more efficient and easier to understand in everyday use,” the company said.

“The frontier models still seem to be neck and neck in some ways,” Forrester Research’s Gualtieri said.

The competitive edge will likely go to the companies willing to spend more money given the expenses of the AI race, experts said. In their earnings reports last month, AlphabetMetaMicrosoft and Amazon each lifted their guidance for capital expenditures. They collectively expect that number to reach more than $380 billion this year.

“These companies are spending a lot of money assuming there’s gonna be a winner take all when in reality we may end up with frontier models being a commodity and several will be interchangeable,” Luria said.

For Google, maintaining a lead in AI won’t be without challenges.

Company executives told employees earlier this month that Google has to double its serving capacity every six month to meet demand for AI services and run its frontier models, CNBC reported last week.

“The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Google Cloud Vice President Amin Vahdat told employees.

Although Google’s in-house TPUs have gotten increased attention as viable alternatives to Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, Nvidia still holds more than 90% of the AI chip market.

In its post on Tuesday, Nvidia pointed out that its chips are more flexible and powerful than ASIC chips, like Google’s Ironwood, which are typically designed for a single company or function.

And despite getting Salesforce’s Benioff to switch to Gemini, Google also has a lot of catching up to do with its consumer chat product, experts said, citing hallucinations and lower user numbers than OpenAI’s.

The Gemini app has 650 million monthly active users and AI Overviews has 2 billion monthly users, Google said last month. OpenAI, by comparison, said in August that ChatGPT hit 700 million users per week.  

“Yes, Google has got its act together,” Luria said. “But that doesn’t mean they’ve won.”

WATCH: AI narrative is shifting towards Google with its complete stack, says Plexo Capital’s Lo Toney

AI narrative is shifting towards Google with its complete stack, says Plexo Capital's Lo Toney

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Apple is challenging India’s anti-trust body over a potential $38 billion fine

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Apple is challenging India's anti-trust body over a potential  billion fine

The first day of sale of the iPhone 15 smartphone in Mumbai, India, on Sept. 22, 2023.

Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Apple has filed a case in Delhi High Court against the country’s anti-trust body because of how it considers global turnover when calculating penalties.

The iPhone maker, which is among the fastest growing smart phone brands in India, is challenging India’s new antitrust law under which the U.S. company could incur fines of up to $38 billion, according to a report by Reuters.

It added it was “unconstitutional, grossly disproportionate, unjust” for the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to use turnover when calculating penalties.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The CCI has been investigating complaints made by an alliance of Indian startups and Tinder-owner Match Group that accuse Apple of “abusive conduct” which forces developers to pay high commissions for in-app purchases.

Apple denied the charges.

The CCI’s final verdict is still pending but it said its “prima facie view [is] that mandatory use of Apple’s IAP for paid apps & in-app purchases restrict the choice available to the app developers to select a payment processing system of their choice”, in an order in December 2021.

Apple recorded its highest-ever quarterly shipments in India of 5 million units in the third quarter of 2025, according to data from IDC.

IDC: Apple still has room to grow in the India smartphone market

The company is expected to sell about 15 million iPhones this year in India and could rank among top five smartphone companies there, Navkendar Singh associate vice president with IDC India said on CNBC’s “Inside India” on Nov. 18.

Apple is among the global companies who are diversifying their manufacturing supply chain from China to India. In 2024, Apple exports from India hit a record of $12.8 billion, growing at more than 42% from year ago.

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