Founder
Nicole Dahlstrom
Back in 2016 when Nicole decided to start an online store selling probiotics for feminine health, she quickly realized that the internet had not leveled the playing field for female health focused startups like it had for other categories of products and services. In fact, there were so many hurdles to overcome online and in several other arenas that Nicole decided to create an opportunity for other FemTech founders and supporters to connect and join forces in solving this problem.
Nicole's mission is to transform the collective frustration felt by innovators creating better products and services for female health into a global movement for collaboration between the entire FemTech ecosystem.
Through over six years of experience providing marketing and project management services to non profits, Nicole has developed the ability to think creatively about raising capital and strategically using all the resources available to achieve her mission.
Ambassadors
Lauryn Dempsey, Denver
Lauryn is the Co-founder and CEO of Norma.
After spending nearly a decade in the Navy driving warships, leading teams, and working in high-level strategic communication and PR roles at the Pentagon, Guantanamo Bay and throughout Southeast Asia, Lauryn left active duty in late 2016 and swapped the D.C. Beltway for the Colorado mountain life.
Since arriving in Denver, she's consulted for local early-stage startups while at the same time finishing her master’s degree and then taking courses for UX/UI and design thinking. Lauryn has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but she never imagined attending a Techstars Startup Weekend event would set her on a course to co-founding a company in the Femtech industry. Lauryn is energized working on women’s breast health issues as it’s a topic that hits close to home, and she feels fortunate to be leading an incredibly talented team of young women who are bringing Norma from idea to reality.
Nuala Murphy, Belfast
Nuala Murphy is a multi-award winning femtech entrepreneur based in Belfast. She is the CEO and founder of Moment Health, a technology company with a groundbreaking digital solution for the prevention and treatment of women’s mental health illnesses.
Nuala launched the Moment Health app in November 2017, which became the #1 app in the Health and Fitness category in its first week. It is currently available in the UK, Ireland, the US and Australia, with plans to continue rolling out to further markets in the coming months.
Described by The Irish Times as “one of the next generation of female business leaders”, Nuala is also a regional leader and the founder of Lean In Ireland, while recent awards and accolades include Digital DNA Entrepreneur of the Year 2018, The Sunday Times Maserati 100 2018, and Top 100 Startup UK 2018.
Sarah Dubow, Los Angeles
Sarah is a healthcare strategist, women's rights activist, and wellness aficionado. She graduated from Bucknell University with a double major in Psychology and English where her passion for women's health was first ignited. She is extremely passionate about the FemTech space and strongly believes it is a critical component to closing the gender gap in healthcare.
Sarah has worked on a multitude of award-winning women's health clients including Plan B Emergency Contraception, Paragard, and Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM as well as other women's cause -related campaigns including female education non-profit She's The First's annual summit and P&G's global "Thank You Mom" Olympics campaign.
She also founded The Lemon Tribe, an online wellness community focused on connecting women with chronic illness and providing educational tools to help them heal, informed by her 12 year journey with an autoimmune disorder.
Sarah is thrilled to be a catalyst for change in tech by joining with female change-makers across the industry to shake things up and close the gender gap in healthcare - and beyond.
Karissa Barnett, San Francisco
Karissa is an entrepreneur and a strong supporter of women in leadership. As the former Great Streets Analyst with the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, she managed a nine-million dollar budget tasked with revitalizing thirteen neighborhoods throughout Washington, DC. Previously, she was a political operative for four years where she led local, statewide, and federal political campaigns as the Vice President of a fundraising firm located in Washington, DC.
She received her bachelor's degree in political science from University of California, San Diego.
Jen Lehr, San Francisco
Jen Lehr is a proud recent graduate of Scripps College-The Women’s College of the Claremont College Consortium. At Scripps, she studied Public Policy Analysis and continued to develop a keen interest in women’s health. In addition to her studies, Jen ran varsity cross country and track at Scripps and competed at the national level.
She has worked at various foundations and nonprofits devoted to women’s issues and sexual health, including teaching comprehensive sex education to high school students. Jen believes that the Fem Tech space will provide a surge of much-needed innovation to women’s health, and she is excited to have a front row seat to the revolution.
Board of Advisors
Martha Davis
Martha is an experienced founder and senior executive with deep knowledge of business, technology and design. Her career spans solutions for consumer, medical and fashion where she has had extensive experience bringing ideas to reality.
A demonstrated leader, Martha has exceptional strength in connecting innovation to markets through the development of useful, usable and compelling user centered products. Graduate of Rhode Island School of Design & UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business.
Martha was most recently the CEO/Creative Director of footwear company, Martha Davis Shoes. She has lead senior executive roles in creative and business at leading technology and design firms such as Smart Design, Razorfish, Organic and Autodesk. She also co-founded and acted as CEO/ Creative Director of Able Design, a multi-disciplinary consultancy in NYC for 10 years.
Past clients include fortune 500 companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, IMB, Sony, Chrysler and 3Com. Her most notable projects include the iconic Dialpak package & system for oral contraceptives produced by Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceuticals and Audrey, one of the first consumer web tablets produced by 3Com. She is an award- winning designer with multiple patents registered in the USA. She has been published widely and her work is included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum.
Nimisha Gandhi
Nimisha is a certified holistic nutritionist, certified Ayurvedic counselor, certified Yoga Nidra teacher, and a former tech founder of a women's gaming company. She holds a B.S. in Psychobiology from UCLA and has years of additional education in clinical research, human biology, gut microbiome, and environmental health.
Nimisha serves as an advisor for Anchor Meditation Studio, FemTech Collective, and Integrated Medicine Initiative For Teens. She also advises wellness providers and companies on how to build a holistic, forward-thinking brand and service. Nimisha is a connector and collaborator. She gives workshops, talks, classes and webinars regularly.
In her private practice, Moon Cycle Nutrition, Nimisha works with teenage girls, fertility, prenatal and postpartum woman, and those with chronic gastrointestinal conditions. Her work weaves ancient wisdom with modern medicine and it’s highly individualized to meet the needs of her clients. Nimisha’s work is research-based, intuitive, and from the soul.
Ann Garnier
Ann is a seasoned healthcare leader, helping to create, launch, and scale innovative tech companies and products that have improved patient outcomes and access to care.
At Lisa Health, Ann is leading a team fusing technology and behavioral science to improve the wellbeing of midlife women. She is passionate about women’s health and advancing research to reduce the serious and costly health risks that women face as they age. Before Lisa Health, Ann was Chief Operating Officer at CarePayment, a leader in patient engagement. She also held senior leadership roles at several ground-breaking companies, including RelayHealth (McKesson) and Paradigm Health (Alere). During this period, Ann developed several market leading products for women and children’s health.
Additionally, she has spent the past 15 years as a volunteer mentor to parenting teen girls. Ann has advised many healthcare technology and services companies from early stage to high growth on fundraising, strategy, product innovation, marketing, and customer success.
She knows intimately the challenges companies face at every stage of their evolution from the initial idea to scaling for rapid growth. Ann excels at building market-leading companies using technology to tackle big healthcare problems, particularly for complex, underserved, and vulnerable populations.
Glen Semino
Glen has a passion for all things tech. He loves tackling the unique challenges that arise when working for startup companies and has 10+ years of experience at start-up and enterprise level software companies both as an individual contributor and leader. He enjoys advising and helping friends in their startups.
Glen is always on the lookout for the latest technologies and how those technologies can help improve efficiencies and business processes. He is quick to learn anything that is presented to him. Great at troubleshooting any type of technical issue and debugging code.
Glen believes that a solution can be found to any technical problem. When on a team, he likes to learn from those he works with and likewise to spread the knowledge on anything he knows. He believes that the only constant in technology is change and based on that in the field of technology we must constantly evolve.
Julia Bernstein
Julia is Vice President of Strategy & Development at Beacon Health Options, where she is responsible for Beacon's relationships with health plans, counties and state agencies on the West Coast. Prior to joining Beacon, Julia served as the Vice President for Business Development at the Institute on Aging, a San Francisco-based provider of services for older adults and adults with disabilities.
Starting her career as a consultant in McKinsey & Co's Boston office, Julia was an early employee at Ginger.io, the digital mental health platform, where she led Strategy and Business Development efforts.
Julia also advises a number of early-stage companies on commercialization and is a frequent speaker/writer on the evolving health care landscape. She received her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Bruce Wang
Bruce previously was CTO at Brightergy, where he led their software development and strategy for their Solar and Energy IoT platform.
Before that, he ran Lexmark Enterprise Software’s Global Cloud Services team which he joined after Lexmark acquired the company he co-founded. He has extensive experience in software development, DevOps and cloud technologies as well as advising and growing early-stage tech companies.
He’s a serious foodie and currently works and lives in San Francisco.
Laura Kyriazis
Laura advises and represents startups and emerging growth in raising money, on legal strategy, general corporate legal matters, licensing of intellectual property, and international relations. Named superior service provider to Clear Ventures, she represents three early seed companies in their portfolio and other early seeds in IoT, BlockChain, ecommerce, etc.
As an experienced board member, she served on the Board of startups and one publicly traded technology company (FRONTEO AND UBIC on the Tokyo Stock Exchange) and is current Founder Advisor for music technology, fin-tech and BlockChain companies.
Ms. Kyriazis most recently served as the General Counsel for Atrenta, Inc. She has over eighteen years experience as an intellectual property, licensing, commercial and corporate transactions attorney. She has represented both large public and emerging private high technology companies such as Atrenta (EDA), Genentech, Virtual Power Systems, (data center technology), Reflektion, (e-commerce predictive analytics), Intrinsic-ID, (IoT), WootCloud (IoT), Sequence Design (EDA), MarketLive, CyberSource, Sensacell, and Cypress Semiconductor as Corporate Counsel and was the lead and senior negotiator for Macrovision Corporation.
Ms. Kyriazis earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Constitutional Law at the University of California, Los Angeles with top departmental honors and attended the University of San Francisco School of Law.
Specialties: Negotiation of multimillion software deals worldwide with top 200 North America, EMEA and APAC customers, advanced technology licensing, IP litigation management, all corporate transactions, incorporation, subsidiary creation and maintenance for 11 jurisdictions worldwide, extensive M&A experience, drafted S-1 for impending IPO, extensive knowledge of Chinese IP law and doing business in China in both Beijing and Shanghai, FCPA and international export compliance
Shubhra Jain
Dr. Shubhra Jain leads healthcare investments at Cota Capital. Dr. Jain is a Physician by background, has her Masters in Engineering from Stanford with a major in Biodesign and her MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
Prior to Cota, Dr. Jain was Associate Director of Commercial Strategy and Corporate Development at Natera where she focused on Biopharma Partnerships, the diligence of potential acquisitions, market research and competitive positioning. Prior to Natera, she led Product management for Acute care suite of products at Pieces Technologies where she led product development and launch of SaaS risk surveillance and prediction solutions for clinical outcomes and published peer-reviewed research on the subject. Prior to Pieces, Dr. Jain served as a consultant and an advisor to several health tech startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Dr. Jain is passionate about applications of technology in healthcare, entrepreneurship, startups and social causes - empowerment of women, access to quality healthcare and education. She also manages a non-profit that runs two secondary level schools and two hospitals in rural India.