LGBTQIA + healthcare Folx Health startup raises $25M

Folx Health, a telemedicine service with a focus on the LGBTQIA + community, raised $25M in Series A. The total funding is close to $30M. The funds will be used to scale in all US states (so far they are available in 11 only) and to increase the number of products and services for all members of the transgender and queer community. “We are well aware of the nature of the needs and the depth of pain that the community has to face today, and from our own experience we realized how broken the healthcare system is for it,” says the project’s founder, A. G. Breitenstein.

Back in 2018, community representatives noted discrimination against queer and transgender people in the field of medical services: 29% of transgender people faced a denial of medical services because of their gender identity.

Investors from Bessemer Venture Partners, who led the round, note, on the one hand, a strong activist and pro-social component of the project, and on the other, the perspective and size of the market with which the startup works. According to one of the fund’s investors, 2% of the US population identifies as transgender, and simple mathematics helped estimate the potential multimillion-dollar profit not only in the field of hormone replacement therapy, but also in general medical support. And the opportunity to work in a wide field of the LGBTQIA + community generally implies several billion dollars, since from 10 to 20 percent of the total population of the country associate themselves with the community. In general, today our race, gender, socio-economic status determine our interaction with health care, and such a focussed approach is a promising direction in the sphere.

There are now a number of other companies in the US market with a focus on the LGBTQIA + community: Violet mental health support service, Included Health employee health care business app and Plume hormone therapy support service for transgender people.

For its users, Folx Health offers hormone replacement therapy (HRT) with medical support and monthly subscriptions from $59. The startup is now at the stage of launching services to support sexual health, treat various dysfunctions, and test and treat STIs. At the same time, all services will be adapted to the specific features of queer and trans person bodies. Also, a library of content useful for LGBTQIA + is starting to work on the project’s website, which is designed to answer a variety of questions about the health of community representatives.