Femtech At Work

On this episode of Femtech At Work, Mary Doube, civil engineer turned competitive strongwoman and co-founder/CEO of Aviiana, shares how being told her crippling perimenopause symptoms were "trauma" pushed her to build the app she couldn't find anywhere else. After VCs passed, Mary and her co-founder turned to their community, raising $700,000 in a crowdfunding round that closed in 48 hours flat. Now backed by a health-tech growth partner, Aviiana is building a women's health innovation platform combining a symptom tracker, a doctor-ready health passport, and a vetted directory of professionals. This is a masterclass in investing in women's healthcare — not from a boardroom, but from a mum of three who nearly didn't make it through her own perimenopause. If you've ever been told you're "fine" while your body says otherwise, you need to hear this.

Key Takeaways:
Why did one doctor's diagnosis send this founder into a mental health crisis instead of an answer?
Find out how a civil engineer with no medical background ended up building a health tech platform used by thousands of women
Discover what happened in the 48 hours after this founder asked her community for money instead of investors
What did the VCs get wrong when they passed on funding this founder — twice?
Use this founder's story to rethink what you assume about your own "unexplained" symptoms

Resources:
Mary Doube: LinkedIn
Aviiana: LinkedIn
Aviiana: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook |
Aviiana: aviiana.com.au/
Maaike Steinebach: LinkedIn
Website Femtech Future: femtechfuture.com
Instagram Femtech Future: @femtech_future

If this episode made you sit with the memory of a doctor telling you "you're fine" while your body was screaming otherwise, you are not alone, and you are not imagining it — Mary's story is proof that the answers exist even when the system hasn't caught up yet, and if this conversation gave you even a flicker of recognition, do one thing right now: leave a 5-star review on whatever platform you're listening on, because it takes 30 seconds and it's the single most powerful way to help Femtech At Work reach the women who need to hear a story like Mary's, so subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss a founder story like this one, and thank you so much for being here. See you next week.

What happens when one of Australia's leading integrative GPs starts scaling women's metabolic health to thousands? Dr. Michelle Woolhouse, founding medical doctor at Vively and author of The Wonder Within, joins Femtech At Work to answer exactly that.
The healthcare system is built for disease management, not for the woman who feels exhausted, hormonally stuck, and told she is fine when she knows something is deeply wrong. Dr. Michelle spent 25 years in integrative medicine, watching this play out, and built something different. Vively combines CGMs, personalized blood testing, and lifestyle coaching, and with 8,500 members and 2,500 active in coaching, holistic data-driven care for women is proving it can scale.
If diets have failed you and your doctor has dismissed you, this is the femtech conversation that changes the way you think about your health.

Key Takeaways:
Why does your body keep fighting back, no matter how clean you eat, how hard you train, or how disciplined you think you are
Discover what the healthcare system you have trusted your whole life was actually built to do and why your long-term health may never have been the real priority
Find out how a pattern millions of women have called a personal weakness their entire lives might finally have a biological, data-driven explanation that changes everything
Learn what a real model of preventative care for women actually looks like and why it looks nothing like what most of us have ever had access to
What is the one tool you can start using right now to finally understand what is actually happening inside your own body and why the results might surprise you

Resources:
Michelle Woolhouse: LinkedIn
Vively: LinkedIn
Vively: Instagram
Vively: vively.com.au/
The Wonder Within by Dr. Michelle Woolhouse : Buy here
Maaike Steinebach: LinkedIn
Website Femtech Future: https://www.femtechfuture.com
Instagram Femtech Future: @femtech_future

You just spent time inside a conversation that most women will never find and that matters. Every episode of Femtech At Work exists because founders like Dr. Michelle are doing the work, and because listeners like you keep showing up to hear it.
If something in this episode stayed with you — a question it raised, a shift it started, a thought you cannot stop thinking about — turn that into one action right now. Leave a 5-star review on whatever platform you are listening on. It takes 30 seconds, and it is how Femtech At Work keeps finding and amplifying the voices that women across Asia actually need to hear. Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so the next conversation reaches you first — and thank you so much for being here. See you next week.

It started with a lone tampon rolling around at the bottom of a handbag. That was the moment,
Mia Klitsas, the Co-founder of Moxie, Australia's progressive period care brand on a mission to make women feel genuinely seen through products that are functional, beautiful, and built around real needs that have been overlooked for far too long.
In this episode, Mia takes us behind twenty-one years of building a brand from the ground up, bootstrapped, battle-tested, and unapologetically focused on women. From cracking major retail at 22 with nothing but cold calls and conviction, to developing Australia's first purpose-built pad for endometriosis, there is a lot in this conversation that goes well beyond period care.
If you are building something, selling something, or simply trying to understand what it really takes to create a product women actually need, the answers are in here. Let’s dive in!

Key Takeaways:
Find out how a tampon rolling around in a handbag sparked a business idea that a 21-year-old turned into a launch in just six months with nothing but guts, cold calls, and a dog-with-a-bone attitude
Discover why Moxie calls itself progressive period care and what that actually means when it comes to the way they talk about women's bodies, periods, and pain
Learn what Mia personally uncovered when she sat down with 43 people living with endometriosis, and why what she heard completely changed how Moxie thinks about product development
Find out what Australia's first purpose-built pad for endometriosis actually does differently
Find out why Mia believes the future of women's health innovation isn't just about building products for women and the two words that she thinks should sit at the centre of every founder's process
Find out why Mia thinks most people building in women's health are still getting it fundamentally wrong and the uncomfortable truth she's not afraid to say out loud

Resources:
Mia Klitsas: LinkedIn
Moxie: Instagram | TikTok | YouTube
Moxie: Website
Maaike Steinebach: LinkedIn
Website Femtech Future: https://www.femtechfuture.com
Instagram Femtech Future: @femtech_future

Mia didn't wait for permission to change the conversation around periods, she just started having it. Loudly, honestly, and without apology. And in doing so, she built something that millions of women around the world didn't even know they were waiting for. That's what happens when you stop designing around what's comfortable and start designing around what's real.
If this episode resonated with you, share it with a woman in your life who deserves to feel seen in her health. Like it, leave a review, and help us keep amplifying the founders who are quietly and not so quietly changing the face of women's health. See you next week for another episode of Femtech At Work.

What if the data collected during your pregnancy could predict and even prevent - a heart attack, a stroke, or dementia decades later? That's not a distant vision. That's exactly what HeraMed is building right now.
Anoushka Gungadin's path to CEO of HeraMed is anything but straight from growing up in Mauritius, to a decade in China, to building a leadership practice in Australia. And it's that exact breadth of experience that shapes the way she thinks about women's health. Because in her world, one size has never, and should never, fit all.
This is a conversation about technology, equity, and what it truly looks like to build healthcare that's designed around the woman not the other way around.

Key Takeaways:
Find out how a girl from Mauritius who detoured through China and corporate boardrooms ended up leading one of the most exciting companies in women's health
Discover how HeraMed quietly grew from a single device into a full women's health platform and what that journey reveals about where personalized care is actually headed
Learn the link your doctor probably never mentioned, what happens in your pregnancy and what it could mean for your heart, your brain, and your body decades down the line
Find out why AI is failing women 60% of the time right now and how HeraMed is tackling a bias that most of the health tech world isn't even willing to admit exists
Discover what a "maternity desert" really means and why the scale of the problem in the US is what brought an Australian company all the way across the Pacific
Learn the one thing that makes or breaks clinician buy-in for health tech innovation and why it has nothing to do with how impressive your technology is
Find out what Anoushka thinks is quietly getting in the way of real progress in Australia's femtech space and why she believes the industry's biggest unlock isn't funding, it's each other
Discover why being the only ASX-listed femtech company is not the win it sounds like and what it actually tells us about how far women's health investment still has to go

Resources:
Anoushka Gungadin: LinkedIn
HeraMed: LinkedIn
HeraMed: hera-med.com
Maaike Steinebach: LinkedIn
Website Femtech Future: https://www.femtechfuture.com
Instagram Femtech Future: @femtech_future

Anoushka isn't just building a platform, she's building a future where a woman's health data actually follows her, protects her, and works for her at every stage of life. That vision is rare. And it deserves to be heard.
If this episode resonated with you, share it with a woman in your life who deserves better from her healthcare. Like it, leave a review, and help us keep putting these conversations in front of the people who need them most. Thank you, and see you next week for another episode of Femtech At Work.

Millions of women rely on hormone therapy patches to survive menopause, yet Big Pharma has essentially decided that fixing the global patch shortage isn't profitable enough. What happens when the system fails women, and two midlife founders decide to rewrite the rules of healthcare themselves?
In this episode, Maaike sits down with Johanna Wicks, co-founder of Lorai Health, to expose the frustrating reality behind the global patch shortage and the regulatory question marks surrounding decades-old formulas. Johanna shares her own harrowing battle with undiagnosed perimenopause and reveals Lorai's ambitious, unconventional two-patch strategy to disrupt the market, navigate the brutal world of female-founder funding, and secure a shocking quarter-million-dollar lifeline.
If you are ready for a masterclass in science, fury, and pure resilience, this is an episode you cannot afford to miss. Tune in now to find out exactly how Lorai Health plans to get patches back on the shelves in record time.

Key Takeaways:
Find out what two years of unexplained symptoms, repeated doctor visits, and a diagnosis that should have come much sooner taught Johanna and how it completely rewrote the path her career would take
Discover the uncomfortable truth behind why menopause hormone therapy patches are in chronic global shortage and why the pharmaceutical companies that could solve it keep looking the other way
Learn what Laorai Health's two-patch strategy actually involves and why the timeline for getting a better patch into women's hands is shorter than you might expect
Find out why manufacturing a hormone therapy patch is far more complicated than it sounds, and how a surprisingly small number of facilities worldwide are even equipped to do it
Learn what Johanna and her co-founder Raisa experienced when they took their vision to venture capital and why the reality of female founders in the funding world is even more sobering than the statistics suggest
Find out how a GoFundMe, a Channel Nine news story, and a stranger on the Gold Coast set off a chain of events that resulted in a quarter-million-dollar donation and what it signals about where true support for women's health actually comes from
Discover why Australia's sophisticated investor rules may be quietly shutting the very women who believe in Lorai Health out of the opportunity to back it and why Johanna thinks the whole system needs a rethink