Peter Thiel, the right-wing billionaire and funder of countless anti-abortion political candidates, is pouring more money into women’s health.
Recharge Capital announced Thursday that Thiel is among the top funders of its $200 million women’s health investment vehicle focused on funding fertility care in foreign countries. According to Axios, the vehicle will focus on companies working in “menstrual wellness,” “women's disease prevention,” and “international fertility medical tourism”—specifically in areas like Southeast Asia, a destination for women in countries where fertility treatment is heavily restricted.
“This a real opportunity for a large business to be built that does something great for the world,” Manu Gupta, the founder of one of Recharge’s new fund’s limited partners, told the outlet.
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Women’s reproductive health may seem like an odd choice of investment for Thiel, who once wrote that giving women the right to vote was bad for democracy and heavily championed anti-abortion political candidates. (Insiders recently told Reuters that Thiel had tired of Republicans’ anti-abortion stances.) Asked about this disconnect, Recharge Capital told Axios that “all of the investors have a shared belief in the importance of addressing women’s healthcare issues.”
This is not the billionaire’s first foray into the world of women’s wellness. Last year, Thiel led a $3.2 million seed funding round in a women's health startup called 28, which tracks users’ menstrual cycles and gives them tips on diet and exercise—all while encouraging them not to use birth control. A quote on the company’s website from founder Brittany Martinez says that hormonal birth control “promised freedom but tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain” and encourages readers to “begin anew.”
Martinez and her husband, Gabriel Hugoboom, also run a magazine called Evie, a kind of anti-woke, right-wing alternative to traditional women’s magazines; it regularly publishes anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, and, of course, anti-birth-control content. A recent article bemoaned the number of women putting off getting married and having children in order to advance their careers. (Martinez previously told Rolling Stone that Thiel had no investment or involvement in the magazine, though its Thiel-backed app is listed on Crunchbase as “28 by Evie.”)
One of the companies that Recharge Capital has already invested in, Elix Healing, focuses on using Chinese medicine to manage period symptoms. Its website similarly decries how women have been taught to “alter our hormones with synthetic birth control,” and features several articles about women who decided to stop taking the pill.
Thiel is not alone among venture capitalists in investing in fertility and women’s health. A research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical association in 2020 found a “substantial increase” in the number of private equity companies buying up women’s health-care clinics, with 17 of them gaining a private equity affiliation in just three years. And according to PitchBook, women’s healthcare startups raised around $1.16 billion in 2022, compared to just $496 million in 2020. McKinsey recently dubbed such companies—often referred to as “FemTech”—a “market of opportunity” that is “on the cusp of disruption.”
“In a short period of time, FemTech has already demonstrated impressive early wins,” its consultants wrote. “An even greater disruption could be ahead.”
