July 11, 2022
Kimon Angelides, CEO, Femtech Health
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When it comes to building businesses, I’m a big platform approach guy. When I met Kim (Kimon) Angelides the Executive Chairman and CEO of FemTech Health—a data driven personalized health, beauty and wellness brand for women—I knew his organization would soon be making waves in the digital health market.
Kim brings decades of experience championing innovation in healthcare, in both public and private companies. He founded many companies, including one of my favorites, Livongo in Chicago, acquired by TelaDoc just a year after its multi-billion dollar IPO. Kim has been on a role at FemTech, with acquisitions of Birchbox, Liquid Grids and Mira Beauty—and I think he is just getting started.
As Executive Chairman of Revieve, I love ventures that take personalization of health, beauty and wellness to the next level—especially for women. I invited Kim to join me for an episode of The Reboot Chronicles podcast, to talk about what led to yet another of his remarkable founding journeys … and why FemTech.
A Single Point Source
With his seventh startup FemTech Health, Kim saw the need to bring about a single destination for woman’s care. “I saw the sort of inequities in women’s health” he says, “and the fact that the VC market got really interested in women’s health. Unfortunately, what they did was, they broke it up, they fragmented and started investing in little solutions, and certainly like fertility, menopause and pregnancy. Where would a woman actually get care in one place, a single destination was really the challenge.So it’s been a great area to be in and that’s why we got into it.”
An All Women Team
With a platform reach of over ten million members, and a female led executive team, the company is well on their way to few hundred employees. Kim was named disruptive founder of the Year by Rock Health and Goldman Sachs—and with global private equity groups and companies like Walgreens and Unilever invested in FemTech, his team is taking the category to the next level of mass-market leadership.
Holistic End To End Solutions
Leveraging a consumer segment centered around online engagement and communities, FemTech Health offers women a platform with “end to end” experiences. With other companies focusing on market components, Kim’s team has been able to offer a paradigm shift by addressing broader objectives. “We really didn’t want to build something that just spoke to the reproductive machinery but something broader than that. We focused on journeys and not age, as women could go between lots of different journeys. For example, hormone balance might be accompanied by services for sexual wellness.”
“Building it around journeys, real life things where women could build an ecosystem of products and services that actually spoke to that journey, that particular stage or state of their life that they were in, rather than saying, oh, well, you’re 40 or 50, you need to have this stuff.”
From Self Care to Health Care
The team is capitalizing on aspects that bring communities together, and extending that further to avenues that will bring about a wholesome experience for women. “Beauty as I’ve learned, is a purely transactional type of business where they buy products for self care. Why not extend that sort of transaction which is going from self care to health care?”
When others in healthcare wondered why beauty as a category, Kim was able to see a broader picture. “That’s the community where they really can understand and that’s a community that you can actually start to expand and introduce things that they start speaking about.
So that’s why we built it, we built a platform that would be and can be built on journeys, and that we could create both an ecosystem of products that spoke to a woman at that particular stage and services that supported her.”
The shift we have observed over the course of the pandemic and lockdown days is health, beauty and wellness all coming together; consumer mentality reflects more of an emergence of proactive versus reactive approach in these core categories. Seizing this opportunity—marrying healthcare and beauty—to offer more bespoke solutions to women is core to FemTech’s business and success model. “I believe it’s doable” Kim says when it comes to offering individual formulas made to one’s biology.
Data Driven Approach to Building Businesses
Scaling one to one bespoke stuff can be facilitated by a data driven approach, and “the inputs have to be data rich” says Kim. The very launch of his company was based on millions of records of medical claims data. Helping identify predictors of certain conditions like osteoporosis or endometriosis based on data is huge.
“What sort of products and what sort of services can you actually offer to alter the trajectory? How do you do this so that the individual doesn’t get to that particular state?It has been incredibly exciting to be able to take datasets, and find out with some degree of 95 to 98% confidence that you can actually provide products and an early intervention. That’s a big deal.”
As to what he envisions for the future, Kim says his dream is that there’s no delineation of selfcare and beauty products from healthcare; instead offer an unsegmented experience. “If what we typically think are consumer products, can become part of that healthcare experience that employers as well as health plans actually recognize, it would be a dream come true!”
