The latest report from Cut Through Ventures found that female-only founding teams accounted for less than 0.5% of total capital raises undertaken in the latest quarter in 2025 – meaning that 2025 is on track to be the lowest year on record for female founders. Yes, you read that right.
But within the growing field of digital health, a different narrative is emerging – and it’s something we’re here to celebrate at Missing Perspectives.
The Priority Digital Health Challenge aims to support startups working on solutions for undeserved populations with health conditions – and every finalist selected over the last two years has been a woman.
Now in its second year, the Challenge – delivered by Cogniss with support from AWS and the University of Melbourne’s Validitron – aims to fast-track promising health innovations into adoption-ready apps. The program offers a 12-month runway that includes no-code development, usability testing, and infrastructure support.
This year, five women-led projects were selected to pitch to a panel dominated by female leaders, including the CEOs of the Australian Digital Health Agency, the Digital Health CRC, and the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. Two projects were chosen as winners: Project SHINE, developed by Dr. Sarah Hanieh from the University of Melbourne, which offers multilingual nutrition education for migrant families; and Lights Out, led by Professor Caroline Donovan from the School of Applied Psychology at Griffith University, an app designed to support children struggling with sleep.
The success story began last year with an all-women finalist cohort. Both winning projects – Melanatal, created by NHS clinical entrepreneur and midwife Ruby Jackson to address skin tone bias in maternity care, and Journey to Recovery, a stroke rehabilitation app led by Associate Professor Belinda Lange of Flinders University, have since launched and are now in use.
We caught up with Professor Caroline Donovan – who is also a clinical psychologist – to discuss her Lights Out app. Donovan says one-third of Australian children are experiencing sleep difficulties. So why does she think sleep issues in children are so under-discussed and under-treated?
“I think parents talk about their child’s sleep problems a lot – but they have been seen as a ‘normal’ phase that children will just grow out of – and some kids do just grow out of them,” she says. “For others though, they become chronic problems that can last into later childhood, adolescence, and even adulthood. There are very few trained paediatric sleep psychologists and medical specialists – and therefore even when sleep problems are taken seriously, it is very difficult for parents to get evidence-based treatments.”
Winning the Priority Digital Health Challenge means that they’ll be able to start building the app starting next month. She says that securing funding had been challenging – a common issue amongst female founders. “However, for our online programs, it was very difficult to get the funding to develop them – and then keep them going. Digital programs require constant improvements to security, as well as tech upgrades. They are quite expensive to both build and maintain,” she said.
Over the course of her career, Caroline has supervised dozens of psychology students – so how does she mentor young women in academia, and encourage them to step into the entrepreneurial space? “In mentoring young women in academia, I try to encourage them to go after whatever it is they want to do. If that’s to balance work with motherhood, then I encourage that. If they want to try to step out into a different field, I encourage that,” she says.
“My basic philosophy is that women can do anything we cannot do everything – at least not all at once. Sometimes I think that women are now expected to be perfect in every domain of their life – it’s so much pressure. There are few superwomen. Women should do what they want to do the way they want to do it – and not be expected to be all things to all people all of the time.”
Top photo – Pictured: Professor Caroline Donovan, Source: Griffith University
