Femtech Startup Elda Health Raises $1.5 Mn In Seed Funding The funds will enable the homegrown brand to scale up its offerings, operations, hire new talent, onboard health and wellness professionals and doctors to expand its circle of expertise

Bengaluru-based femtech startup Elda Health, a women-led one-stop holistic health platform for the mid-age urban woman, on Thursday announced that it has raised $1.5 million in a seed round from Avaana Capital, Orios Ventures, and Ananth Narayanan Family office.

"Women's health has been underserved for generations. While puberty and pregnancy are celebrated and tended to, pivotal phases of women's lives such as menopause (that last 10 - 30 years) are completely ignored. With Elda we strive to change that. Elda's community of over 35-year-old women is a safe space for their wellness conversations, counseling, and curated health programs. We're thrilled to have found a set of partners whose ideals align with ours. Their backing and experience will accelerate our efforts to ensure the prioritization of women's health," said Swathi Kulkarni, co-founder, and chief executive officer, Elda Health.

The amount will enable the brand to scale up its offerings, operations, hire new talent, onboard health and wellness professionals and doctors to expand its circle of expertise.

"Women's health is fragmented. At Elda, we aim to bridge this gap in healthcare access and awareness by creating a holistic health platform bringing in multi-specialty medical specialists and coaches to understand and cure women's health issues intimately. We are starting with midlife women's healthcare, as that remains the most unpenetrated, and plan to expand from there. With our investing partners on board, our conviction towards this mission is stronger than ever," added Sindhuri Ananth, co-founder, Elda Health.

Elda serves as an everyday companion for midlife women on their healthcare journey, empowering them with measurable health outcomes. Through a dynamic dashboard, Elda helps users track the entire spectrum from symptoms to activities, and via a comprehensive reporting mechanism map progress made on health goals.

"Our conviction in Elda Health stems from the perfect blend of the founding team's experience of building women-focused and tech-led products and an outcome-driven approach to women's mid-life care. We are delighted to partner with Elda on their journey to build for a systematically unattended need-gap and make their mark in the growing femtech space," shared Shruti Srivastava, principal, Avaana Capital.

Leveraging its panel of experts, Elda offers customized health pathways that include personalized consultations with medical experts, and curated information to help build awareness around critical physical and mental health concerns.

"As an early-stage startup, Elda's mission to innovate for India's women healthcare issues that have remained unaddressed for generations, really resonated with us. Elda's healthtech platform will no doubt create a disruption in this new space that is valued at $600 billion globally. We are excited to partner with the Elda team on their journey to reimagine the women's healthcare industry," commented Anup Jain, managing partner, Orios Ventures.

Elda Health was founded with an aim of making healthcare equal and accessible for women over the age of 35 across the stages of awareness, precaution, diagnosis, and cure. Elda's mission finds its roots in the fact that for far too long, women's health and their specific healthcare needs have been stigmatized. While some incredible strides have been made in normalizing conversations around puberty, menstruation, and pregnancy, menopause remains a systemically ignored conversation even in 2021, the company said.

Across the world, women end up spending an average of $20,000 in trial-and-error prescriptions, doctor visits, treatments, devices, and products during their menopause phase. Globally 1 billion women are expected to be in menopause by 2025 across the world and in India alone 103 million women are in menopause, according to a report shared by the platform.