What does it really take to build a women’s health company in Asia when funding is tight, stigma runs deep, and the stakes are literally people’s futures?

In this very real and unfiltered conversation, I sit down with my long-time friend and serial entrepreneur Anna Haotanto, founder of Zora Health. Anna shares her personal journey—freezing her eggs years before it became 'trendy' and her frustration with the healthcare system that drove her to build a fertility, menopause, and family health platform in Asia, one of the toughest and most complex spaces to operate in. Together, we unpack the emotional and practical realities of building a women’s health company, pitching to investors for a seed round, navigating stigma, regulations, and high treatment costs, and the dark days when Anna almost walked away from Zora.

Raw, honest, and hopeful, this episode is for anyone interested in women’s health, building in FemTech, or needing a dose of real resilience behind the glossy founder stories.

Key Takeaways:

• Discover how a Fintech and F&B founder ended up building Zora Health after thinking she was perimenopausal and hitting multiple medical dead ends
• Learn why egg freezing, IVF, menopause and even sperm health are still wrapped in stigma in Asia and how technology can start to break that
• How Zora Health actually works behind the scenes to connect users with trusted clinics, doctors, diagnostics and care navigators across multiple countries
• Explore why men now make up a significant portion of Zora’s clients, and what this shift reveals about the evolving fertility journeys of couples today
• Find out how corporates really think about fertility and menopause benefits, budgets and internal stakeholders and why selling B2B in health is so complex
• Learn how Anna coped with days of not getting out of bed, and still chose not to quit when everything felt impossible
• Discover what “patient capital” truly means in women’s health
• Find out how genuine human connection and “friction” might be our biggest advantage in an AI world
• Learn the most practical advice Anna has for new FemTech founders in Asia, especially when it comes to monetization, mental health, and playing the long game

Resources:

Anna Haotanto: LinkedIn

Zora Health: LinkedIn

Zora Health: https://zorahealth.co/

Maaike Steinebach : LinkedIn

Website Femtech Future https://www.femtechfuture.com

Instagram Femtech Future: @femtech_future

If this conversation moved you, let it be more than just another episode you listened to on the go. Women’s health in Asia is still being built from the ground up, one founder, one story, one hard conversation at a time and your support genuinely helps that movement grow.

Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it, hit like, leave us a review so more people can discover these voices, and help us push women’s health higher up on every agenda.

Thank you for listening, and see you next year for another episode of FemTech at Work, where we keep building this new future together!