Femtech Spotlight: Liz Klinger of Lioness

This article is part of a series around femtech and the people leading the charge in this growing sector. See the femtech series here.

Lioness CEO Liz Klinger kind of wishes the word “Femtech” didn’t exist. Women, after all, represent a massive market - about 50% of the population. Even so, she’s heard investors ask how products that are tailored to their needs could be considered a big category.

“Like, really?” Klinger said. “Femtech is about trying to get these knuckleheads to understand that there are people out there who have wants and needs who are not you.”

In other words, Femtech is both a rewarding and frustrating space to work in. On the one hand, Klinger leads an innovative (and profitable!) tech company focused on sexual health and pleasure. Klinger founded Lioness in 2013, and in that time the company has garnered devoted fans, reams of positive press coverage and was even a finalist for the ‘Last Gadget Standing Award” at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020.

The Lioness vibrator and app
Source: Lioness

On the other hand, her company still faces many of the hurdles that plague most companies in this space.

“Things have improved, but we’re still having hurdles to get our own message out there,” Klinger said.

She refers to an incident in 2019 when a representative at a women’s tech event asked her to pack up and leave - even after having been invited - 15 minutes before the event was to begin.

“Just to be invited and turned away ...” Klinger said. “When I finally got to speak to this director she said this product was not related to women’s health and it wasn’t a wearable so it shouldn’t be there. The tides are turning with sexual health being considered part of health,” Klinger said, “but there’s still a lot of resistance.”

And while she says the Femtech term and movement has helped get products devoted to addressing problems like sexual health, menstrual health and fertility, among others, on peoples’ and investors’ radar, the fact that there's a need for this movement at all is a point of frustration for Klinger.

“Femtech and Sextech - they did not exist when we started. It was not a thing,” Klinger said. “Femtech emerged as a concept to help venture capitalists and investors understand that women are a market. It was about getting these mostly male, cis investors to understand that women have a want or need for these products. Investors like to think about these categories - there’s FinTech, AgTech … and now there’s Femtech!”

Liz Klinger, Co-founder and CEO of Lioness
Source: Lioness/ Henry Wu

FemTech is used to broadly define products and services that use technology to address women’s health issues and concerns. The Lioness’s Smart Vibrator definitely delivers there. It’s a vibrator (and, by all accounts, a good one) equipped with biofeedback sensors to track users’ sexual response.

“The benefit is that over time, you can see how different things affect your pleasure - like, stress, alcohol, medications, illness - as well different contexts - like with a partner, without one, during your menstrual cycle,” Klinger said.

And while there are loads of sex geeks who just think that data is really cool, orgasm and sexual response have a strong (although often unrecognized) tie to our overall health and well-being.

Klinger refers to one user who suffered a head injury and subsequently noticed changes in her sexual response patterns.

“She saw this massive change in her own data through the Lioness and it got her to start taking her recovery more seriously because she could see that her orgasms were affected,” Klinger said.