“One of the most significant untapped investment opportunities of our time”

Maryann Selfe spent more than two decades in private banking and institutional investment management. Now she is an institutional investor and founder of Calabar Capital. She makes the point that unmet healthcare needs and women’s central role in healthcare spending are blind spots that could be a multibillion investment opportunity.

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Maryann Selfe talks about a real big blind spot in private healthcare markets. “It is multibillion Dollars in size”, she says.
Maryann spent more than two decades in private banking and institutional investment management, most recently leading investment solutions for private clients in Zurich. Now she is an institutional investor and founder of Calabar Capital. Currently, she is setting up a new fund which will focus on health care with a primary focus on women’s health. Calabar is targeting its first close in the first quarter of 2027.

Progress in women’s medicine

She explains why the time is ripe for a fund with this focus: “For a long time, the male body was treated as the default in medical research and product development. That has left significant gaps in our understanding of women’s health. Today, advances in science, data and technology are making it possible to address many of those gaps.” She gives the example of a myoma, which is extremely common: By age 50, around 70% of white women and 80% of black women develop uterine myomas.

“Fibroids are one of the leading reasons why women undergo hysterectomies,” she says. “After major surgery, a woman may need to stay in hospital for several days, followed by a lengthy recovery. Altogether, this can cost a great deal of money for the healthcare system and significantly affect the woman’s life.”

Today, newer technologies can treat certain fibroids without removing the uterus. Minimally invasive procedures using radiofrequency energy can reduce the recovery time, adverse effects and costs associated with traditional surgery. This can make the opportunities more difficult to evaluate using conventional healthcare-investment frameworks.

“The problem is that many of the companies developing these treatments begin in private markets, where investors may have had limited exposure to women’s-health conditions, technologies and business models,” she says.

“If you are a health care investor, and you have never developed the expertise to evaluate women’s health, you may be overlooking risks and opportunities you simply cannot see.”

What conventional healthcare analysis can miss

Selfe shows how these blind spots can distort investment decisions, leaving a multibillion dollar market underfunded despite the scale of unmet healthcare needs and women’s central role in healthcare spending. Although there has been considerably more research into women’s health in recent years, many private-market investors still consider investment in women’s-health innovation to be higher risk.

Selfe argues that this is not primarily a moral case. It is an investment case: a large area of healthcare in which scientific progress, unmet demand and capital allocation have not yet fully converged. “I see an opportunity for health care gains and compelling commercial outcomes. However, not every company in this field will make money, so you have to be selective”, Maryann warns.

Five years ago, women’s health care investing might not have been a compelling institutional story, but today, forces seem to be converging. So it might be that she has detected this huge blind spot at the right time.

Women’s investment power has increased considerably

“By 2030, an estimated 1.2 billion women worldwide will be in their menopause …. do you see the size of the potential market?”, she asks. At the same time, she also observed a significant change among private investors: “When I started working with private clients more than thirteen years ago, the majority of high-net-worth investors I encountered were men. This has changed dramatically.”

As the intergenerational wealth transfer accelerates, women are controlling a growing share of private wealth and are increasingly involved in family investment decisions. They are also well educated, financially sophisticated and more actively engaged in deciding how their capital is invested.

However, Selfe emphasises that women’s health should not be seen as an investment theme only for female investors. “The investment case should be able to stand in front of any investment committee,” she says. “The relevance of the underlying healthcare needs is not determined by the gender of the investor.”

Women’s health as an exciting investment case

She is glad to see that some family offices are already embracing that theme. “They are already allocating capital to women’s health innovation. Family offices can have longer time horizon than many other investors”, she says. But she wants that also the next generation of investors, and also institutional investors such as pension funds, to be able to participate in this theme as it develops. This requires credible investment structures, specialist expertise and a disciplined approach to risk and manager selection.

Book: Billion Dollar Blindspot

This is why she has published her book “Billion Dollar Blind Spot”. In this book she writes about the chronic underinvestment in women’s health and explains the investment thesis in detail. Why does the opportunity exist? Why now? And how can investors participate? She argues that women’s health is a structurally undercapitalised area of healthcare, creating potentially mispriced opportunities within the broader healthcare sector.

In her book, she combines deep research, dozens of expert interviews, and her own experience advising ultra high net worth families to show how these blind spots distort capital flows. The book also highlights the new generation of women’s health companies and AI enabled technologies that are beginning to correct this imbalance.

Maryann shows that only a small fraction of healthcare investment has historically been directed towards conditions that affect women exclusively or disproportionately, despite women’s significant influence over household healthcare decisions and their growing share of global wealth.

“Women’s health is neither a niche nor simply a social-cause issue,” Maryann says. “It is a substantial and increasingly investable part of the healthcare economy. But investors need the expertise and discipline to distinguish genuine opportunities from the broader narrative.”

In her book, she wants to provide investors with a roadmap for understanding the sector’s dynamics, the structural inefficiencies that have held it back and the forces now reshaping its future.
“My hope is that, in five to ten years, women’s health will be a mainstream part of healthcare investment,” says Maryann.

Hier geht’s zum Buch.

Foto: Maryann Selfe

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