Our interview with Inara Lalani, Co-Founder & CEO at FemTherapeutics, Forbes 30 Under 30

Our VP of Communications, Sarah, sat down to talk with Inara about her career path, life as a co-founder & the cross between sciences and VC.

Tell us about your educational background and how that led to where you are in your career now.  

I grew up in Southeast Asia, so most of my time was spent in Singapore and Thailand before moving to Canada to pursue my undergrad. I picked McGill because it’s an institution that widely celebrates diversity and it offered the opportunity to pursue a degree with a lot of different disciplines. I started out pursuing a Bachelor of Commerce focused on Information Systems with a minor in Entrepreneurship and was accepted into the Surgical Innovation program in my 2nd year. This is a graduate-level program that brings together doctors and masters students pursuing computer science and engineering. I was the only undergraduate student at the time to be selected for the program. It was an incredible opportunity to gain insight into how to create a business by discovering unmet needs in the clinical space, prototyping, filing your first patent and pitching for your first funding dollars. I walked away with the opportunity to incorporate my business at the conclusion of the program and since graduating, I’ve focused my efforts on FemTherapeutics while doing a little bit of consulting work on the side.

Can you tell us about your consulting work?

I never envisioned becoming an entrepreneur. Similar to other BCom students, I was on track to become a full-time consultant by the time I graduated. I spent a year recruiting with EY where I then secured a job as a technology consultant mostly in the banking technology practice. I started that role during COVID while still working part-time on FemTherapeutics. I then reached a point in my career in April of 2022 where I was ready to move full-time to FemTherapeutics. I was always working on the company on a part time basis but with medical device startups, timelines to development are typically 8 years on average. Having a business lens, I felt like the groundwork that we needed to do initially was on the tech side, so we had our CTO working full time on the business in 2021 before I was ready to join her.

How did you get into the healthcare space without the health sciences background?

The Surgical Innovation Program is based off a Stanford Bio-Design program and is open to students with any kind of background. They typically look for business students, engineers with the computer science or mechanical engineering background as well as physicians. The success model for the program is about creating multidisciplinary teams. What we tend to find, specifically in medical devices or biotech startups is that clinical researchers end up leading the team but there are knowledge gaps related to fundraising and building a financial forecast. This program helped us build the right team that combined all those different disciplines. One of my co-founders has an engineering & computer science background and my other co-founder is a practicing physician. The 3 of us complement each other well and I was very lucky to have joined the program at such an early age.

How did you come up with the idea for FemTherapeutics, and what was the unmet need?

Dr. Gangal is our supervisor, and he was the physician that we shadowed in the OR. In our program, we spend 4 months identifying the unmet need. We go out in the OR and ICU with a notebook and jot down any pain points we see both operationally and clinically. Dr. Gangal helped expose us to this unmet need and since then, he's joined us as a peer on our founding team.

I noticed this is a VC-backed organization, what was it like going through this process to try and raise money?

I knew it was going to be hard from the get-go. On average, 2% of women-led startups receive VC funding and there’s about a 50% disparity in terms of how much men's health gets funding versus women's health. We raised our first VC dollars in September of 2022, and it took us about 5-6 months before we were able to secure that funding. In the meantime, we were trying to ramp up our non-dilutive funding efforts from the government through different initiatives. Fundraising from VCs is not for the faint-hearted. There are a lot of due diligence questions that get asked, some of which can get personal. When investing in an early-stage business, VCs aren’t just buying into the vision, they’re also buying into the founders. It was a great learning process for Negin and I as first-time founders and we're very lucky that we've generated an excellent syndicate of investors that understand the mission we're on.

What was the VC questioning like? Did any cross the line?

Medical devices as a field is predominantly male-driven and a lot of the conversations I had with male lead VC firms were on the topic of age (Why are you so young, why do you believe you can run a business at the age of 20, etc.) Other questions were on the topic of family and when I’m ready to raise a family, what that looks like for the business. I remember one jarring question; we were asked if we considered early revenue opportunities before getting FDA clearance. That made us step back and consider what type of VC firm we wanted to work with. We're committed to providing a safe and effective solution on the market, not just trying to generate money right away without proper approval. That got us thinking about how we could interview the VCs to make sure they’re the right fit for us. At the end of the day, they're our business partners long term and we want to make sure it’s a good relationship. We’re very happy that our current investors all support the vision that we have.

Now having gone through the VC interview process, what advice would you have given yourself if you were to start again?

The challenge that I always had with jumping into FemTherapeutics so early was my age. I felt like there was a lot that I wanted to learn, and I wanted to build credibility to bring that into my leadership role at FemTherapeutics. The short stint that I had at EY really prepared me to do that. I would have liked to trust myself a little bit more in those conversations too. We do see businesses being led by very young people who have been quite successful. Trust yourself and then lean into that discomfort because you'd be surprised by how much you can ‘fake it till you make it’.

Any specific challenges you faced when managing people who were older than you or more experienced in a certain field?

There are about 14 of us now and I'm probably the youngest on our team aside from the interns. How do you lead a team when you're not a subject matter expert on everything or when you have to lead a PhD candidate with more years of experience than you? Know where your expertise is and trust others around you who are the subject matter experts in their field. I may work with a mechanical engineering expert, and I focus on leading with what I know best on the business/operational lens.

Your company focuses on personalized prosthetics for women’s health - why is this such an important topic and how did your vision come to life?

Pelvic floor disorders will affect 1 in every 3 women at some stage in their life. The support around pelvic floor health was limited and we found a huge knowledge gap specifically for patients who are postpartum and who struggle to maintain their pelvic floor. This can lead to severe conditions that require a surgical procedure or noninvasive devices. While doing our rotations with Dr. Gangal, we noticed a high failure rate for the current noninvasive devices on the market. 50% of the time, these devices displace and fall out because they’re not a good fit. A lot of patients have previously tried these devices but have then ended up having to get a hysterectomy. We knew we could provide a better fitting prosthetic not just through personalization but by reinventing the way the mechanism of this device sits in the body to provide a more comfortable fit.

Did you notice any other opportunities once discovering this need?

While we were developing the infrastructure to do this, we discovered a wide array of other use cases that we could eventually expand into. The next step for us is to create a custom cerclage pessary that can support women at risk of delivering early. There's nothing that is custom-made right now in the gynecology space which is so shocking considering every woman has different genetics and pregnancy experiences. We have custom dental options, orthotics, and hearing aids but nothing custom to each woman. We jumped on the opportunity and that's how our vision came to be.

How do you use AI and 3D printing advancements?

Because AI and 3D printing are recent developments, we haven't seen this being produced at a mass scale before. If you tried to 3D print a silicone pessary 4 years ago, you could only do it at a small scale with high unit costs. The fact that we're able to work with newer materials now makes our business model feasible for commercial use. With AI, the struggle we face is not having enough data. Femtech was only coined as an industry in 2016 by Ida Tin (Founder of Clue). The amount of data that startups in the Women's Health space have is still very sparse relating to pelvic floor issues. We’re creating new datasets which means we must start somewhere before we can start employing these AI methods to then create personalized devices.

I can only imagine the challenge you may have had explaining this to VCs… anything specific come to mind?

I was asked why this was a problem they should care about, why women can’t just live with it and what the men’s health use case was. FemTherapeutics is on a mission to bridge the gender disparity gap in healthcare, this is not a device geared towards men. We normalize that pregnancy experiences are painful so postpartum would also be painful. We need to show why this is worthwhile to invest in.  

On the topic of bridging the gender health innovation gap - how are you doing this?

The data piece is the biggest one. We continue to work with other startups and healthcare institutions to put out newer datasets to start developing our own designs. We also feed off of other datasets that might come along for other startups to innovate on. We want to build the first holistic pelvic floor measurements database that can support further R&D innovation. That's a good starting point to bridging the gender disparity gap. There's also the education piece. We need to educate our mothers, daughters, sisters about this condition as well as our male allies. This can help get the message to government officials or public figures who can call for action in Women’s Health.

Have you ever felt imposter syndrome, and if so, how do you cope with it?

All the time, I still battle it every day. The situation where imposter syndrome creeps up on me the most is leading my team. I’m no HR expert, I haven’t been in a business long enough to see what a successful culture looks like. Trying to replicate that internally has been a challenge for us. Your biggest asset in your business is always your team. They’re the ones coming up with ideas and focusing on innovating in-house, but execution is also important. You can put as many dollars as you want towards marketing the device but if the product fails then you have a bigger challenge. To help me deal with that imposter syndrome, I'm very lucky to have Co-founders who I can bounce ideas off of. They inspire me in how they carry themselves and I’m very lucky that I’m able to have candid conversations with them.

What advice would you share for women starting out their careers?

Trust yourself. You’d be surprised by how far you can make it with so little subject matter expertise in the domain that you're trying to pursue because eventually, you build on that. Continue to grow your network. Surround yourself with people who are experts who you can learn from and continue to grow your own skill sets. Your expertise will continue to grow, don’t wait until you’ve mastered something to start. You’ll never stop learning no matter how many years you spend working at something. It's better to start early than to wait for the right time.