Funding opportunity for femtech solutions
Improving the health, wellbeing and sexual and reproductive health and rights of girls and women
UNICEF Femtech Ventures is seeking applications to join its second annual cohort of companies using frontier technologies to build open-source solutions for the health, wellbeing, and sexual and reproductive health and rights of girls and women.
Selected companies join the Femtech Ventures portfolio and receive up to US$100,000 in funding, 12 months of technical mentorship and access to UNICEF's global network, including our relationships with governments, to set solutions on pathways to scale.
If your company is using technologies such as AI, machine learning, blockchain or data science, we want to hear from you. Women-led startups and young founders (under the age of 35) are strongly encouraged to apply.
We’re especially seeking applications from companies:
- Registered in a UNICEF programme country
- Working with a functional prototype
- Committed to open-source licensing and principles
Application deadline: 4 November 2026
Approach to femtech innovation for women and girls
Women and girls make up nearly half the world's population, yet women's health receives just six percent of private healthcare investment globally. While technology is rapidly reshaping how health conditions are detected, monitored and treated, women and girls are not benefiting equally from this progress.
The consequences of this underinvestment are felt most acutely in emerging markets, where barriers to quality care are greatest and the women building solutions to address them remain among the least funded. This is not simply a funding gap. It also represents an opportunity for innovation in global healthcare.
UNICEF Femtech Ventures is a five-year initiative (2025–2030) from the UNICEF Venture Fund to invest in locally developed frontier technology solutions that expand access to health, wellbeing, and sexual and reproductive health and rights of girls and women in emerging markets. Building on more than a decade of Venture Fund learning, Femtech Ventures invests in solutions built by companies close to the challenges they address.
This second call for applications will select the next cohort of Femtech Ventures investees, growing a portfolio of solutions established by the first cohort of 11 companies from eight countries in Africa and Asia.
Central to the Femtech Ventures model is a hyperlocal approach: making systematic, targeted investments in solutions designed within communities, validated in context and built for scale. Safety-by-design is a condition of UNICEF's investment, with companies supported to consider data privacy, consent architecture and user risk from the ground up.
With the global femtech market projected to reach US$146 billion by 2033, Femtech Ventures is creating space for locally developed solutions to shape a rapidly growing sector while addressing persistent gaps in women’s and girls’ health.
What we're looking for
We are looking for companies in emerging markets designing locally grounded solutions with the potential to scale and committed to openness as both a principle and a practice. We believe that inclusive innovation, shaped by a diversity of perspectives and experiences, is essential to creating technologies that respond to local needs.
Femtech Ventures supports both early- and growth-stage companies using frontier technologies such as generative and agentic AI, machine learning and blockchain. We have a particular interest in solutions ready to deploy in low-resource or emergency settings.
Through our second call for applications, we are seeking solutions across three pillars:
Pillar 1: Healthcare access for women and girls
We are looking for frontier technology that improves health outcomes across the continuum of care, from antenatal and postnatal support to newborn and child health, with a focus on reaching underserved communities with quality care. We are particularly interested in solutions designed for primary and community care, such as:
- Point-of-care support tools with automated interpretation of data and/or imagery collected, reducing reliance on visual reads and providing reliable, actionable results for frontline health workers.
Affordable tech-enabled screening tools, especially for conditions that go undetected, such as anaemia, haemoglobinopathies, ferritin status and thyroid function, designed for primary care and community settings.
- Novel applications that connect screening, referral and follow-up at the point of care while generating timely, structured intelligence that strengthens planning, policy and accountability at every level of the health system.
- Frontier health platforms supporting continuity of care across the maternal health continuum, from conception through the first 1,000 days of a child's life, including remote care in low-bandwidth environments.
- Demand forecasting and supply planning tools that ensure essential maternal and child health supplies are available where and when they are needed most, including solutions that integrate staffing, skilling and workload data to strengthen the capacity of community health workers.
Pillar 2: Informed, safe and accessible reproductive health
We are looking for solutions that give women and girls access to the information, tools and services they need to understand and manage their sexual and reproductive health, particularly where it is limited by stigma, distance, cost or restricted mobility. Solutions should strengthen informed decision-making, privacy and control over personal health data. We seek solutions such as:
- AI-powered accessible platforms delivering personalized reproductive health information and counselling in underserved languages, especially for low-literacy and low-bandwidth environments.
Community health worker platforms that extend the reach of sexual and reproductive health and rights services through frontline workers, with interoperable digital tools for case management, referral and follow-up.
- Frontier technology applications for improving the detection and screening of HPV and the delivery of prevention services in primary and community healthcare, designed for the realities of low-resource health systems.
- Tech-enabled platforms that facilitate access to finance for sexual and reproductive healthcare, connecting women and girls to services through innovations in health coverage.
- Consent- and privacy-preserving data solutions that allow women and girls to control how sensitive reproductive health information is collected and used.
Pillar 3: Mental wellbeing, safety and protection
We are looking for innovations that address the psychological, emotional and digital safety needs of women, girls and children, including solutions tackling gender-based violence, online harm and abuse, trauma response, and maternal and adolescent mental health, such as:
- Digital mental health tools providing accessible, culturally appropriate psychosocial support for women, adolescent girls and children, especially interoperable solutions that integrate maternal mental health screening into existing systems such as DHIS2.
- Digital decision-support tools that equip community health workers to identify risks, including those related to maternal mental health, deliver evidence-based interventions and determine when specialist referral is needed.
- AI-enabled platforms for the early detection of and response to gender-based violence, including safe reporting mechanisms, access to information and referral to support services.
Online safety tools that identify, flag and respond to digital abuse, harassment and exploitation targeting women and girls, including through social media monitoring and AI-based detection systems.
- Community-level tools that train and support frontline workers, including teachers, community health workers and social workers, to identify risks and respond to the mental health needs of women and children.
We are actively seeking companies that push the boundaries of frontier technologies in innovative and scalable ways with global relevance. If you think you meet these criteria, we want to hear from you.
Application deadline: 4 November 2026
Further resources
- How to apply: our funding process
- Eligibility criteria and selection: our guidelines
- What happens after you receive an investment: our approach to funding and support
- Learn from previous cohorts: Femtech Ventures (2025–2026)
Background
The UNICEF Venture Fund is UNICEF’s innovation financing platform, investing in early stage, open-source, frontier tech solutions developed in emerging economies to improve outcomes for children and young people. Through equity-free funding and technical mentoring, the Venture Fund invests in solutions built by companies close to the challenges they address and strengthens local innovation ecosystems with the aim of delivering measurable social impact.
Since 2014, the Venture Fund has invested in 102 early-stage companies, more than half of which are women-led. These companies have attracted 11x the initial capital in follow-on investment. Through 2030, the Venture Fund’s focus is on open source, tech for impact that accelerates results for children in three strategic areas: blockchain, climate and femtech.
Together with partners Government of Sweden, GSR Foundation and Temasek Foundation, UNICEF Femtech Ventures backs gender equity and the sexual and reproductive health and rights of girls and women. For millions of girls and women, access to quality care, trusted health information, safe mobility and digital economic opportunity remains uneven or out of reach. Femtech Ventures companies are building AI, blockchain and data science solutions that close these equity gaps.
At UNICEF, we prioritize solutions that not only leverage advanced technologies but also uphold strict data protection measures and safeguarding principles that support the privacy and wellbeing of individuals. We also value a comprehensive approach that strengthens systems and services, recognizing the importance of building resilient and sustainable infrastructure to effectively support health and mental health initiatives, to achieve lasting positive outcomes.
UNICEF is committed to upholding the rights of every child, ensuring that no child is denied opportunities based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or any other status. We maintain a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination, harassment, or exclusion in all aspects of our work, including our programs, partnerships and workplace.
UNICEF fosters an inclusive environment where diversity is valued, and all individuals are treated with fairness, dignity, and respect. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities defines living with a disability as having a long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairment that – in interaction with the environment – hinders one’s participation in society on an equal basis with others.
Application deadline: 4 November 2026
