Coffee Costs, Gamers' Therapy & Femtech 🎮

Overall, femtech is a $600 billion+ market. Yet menopause —  which is clearly an enormous market — continues to attract a trickling of investment dollars. According to Crunchbase, of all the femtech startups receiving funds, only a dozen startups that address menopause have attracted funding over the last 12 months. And most of these fundings have come from female VCs.

• The most recent of these is Vira Health ($12 million funding), which offers personalized digital therapeutics for women going through menopause.
• Then there’s HerMD ($10 million funding), focussing on women’s sexual health and menopause.
• And Gameto ($20 million) that uses cell therapies to extend the time before ovaries stop functioning in order to delay some of the health conditions associated with menopause, including higher BP, heart disease and osteoporosis.

One of reasons for low funding might be that many investors are male and will themselves never experience menopause. Nevertheless, the low interest is still quite shocking given that women who are menopausal, or pre/post-menopausal tend to be at the height of their spending power.

Media and games helped many of us maintain our mental health during the pandemic, but it isn't just pure escapism. Studies suggest games provide unique therapeutic benefits. And now startups like DeepWell and Hikari Lab want to make gaming a bigger part of healthcare and treatment. 

They are creating best-in-class game play that can simultaneously entertain and accelerate treatment for an array of health conditions. 

How does it work? 

Games have a storyline. Startups are now creating gaming stories that take the player through a series of complicated and emotional scenes while indulging in conversations. Since high-profile, expensive games take weeks to complete, the gaming creators can take their time setting out scenarios and guiding the player through emotional breakthroughs over a period.

Why does this work? 

• Studies focusing on the potential positive outcomes of video-games have found that moderate gaming contributes to emotional stability.
• Video-games have been advocated as a means of stress reduction and letting off feelings of anger, guilt, or frustration.
• Depressed mood has been found to be significantly lower in moderate players compared to those who never play video-games.
• Some principles of therapy are also really well done in games. 

It's crazy how much the gaming industry has moved. Originally it was meant for just entertainment purposes. Then, in the past 10-15 years, the industry has also pushed its fangs into the educational world, where games are now created to help kids learn some new task. And now, healthcare!

How much more expensive can your food get? 

We’ve drawn some serious connections here, based of course on a lot of research, to figure out which foods are going to get depressingly expensive.

Corn: 
Russia and Ukraine account for 16% of the global corn exports. The UK and EU source more than 50% of their corn from Ukraine. Thanks to sanctions, corn prices hit a decade high at the onset of the war, rising to ~$7.48 per bushel, up $3 from last year.

Fertilizers and Soybeans: 
The largest exports of nitrogen fertilizers and 21% of potash exports globally come from Russia.. Naturally, fertilizer prices jumped 10% last week, and 40% from the previous month, according to the Green Markets North America Fertilizer Price Index.

Now, Russia sells a chunk of its fertilizer to Brazil, an agricultural giant and the world’s biggest fertilizer importer. Brazilian farmers use this fertilizer to grow soybeans. (Brazil’s the No. 1 producer of soybeans.) 

Expensive fertilizer means expensive soybeans. 

Meat and Wheat:
Brazil sells the majority of its soybeans to China, which uses them to feed livestock. Meaning, meat exports from China are also bound to get expensive. 

UK and EU also use soy and corn as livestock feed. With prices of both grains rising, farmers are turning to wheat for feed instead, creating less of local surplus to export. Not to mention, globally, Russia and Ukraine also account for about 26% of wheat exports. Ergo higher wheat prices. 

Coffee: 
The fertiliser crisis is hitting coffee supplies too. Costa Rican producers use about 1,400 tons of fertilizer to make about 40,000 bags of coffee annually. Bloomberg reported that Central American coffee producers are facing a “mega emergency” on account of fertilizer costs.