From Zero to Scale: A Conversation with Divya Verma on Building Women’s Health Innovation
Most promising health products don’t fail because the science is wrong. They fail in the unglamorous middle — the licensing conversations, regulatory timelines, and launch sequencing that turn an idea into something a patient can actually use. Women’s health, a sector finally attracting serious founders and capital, is about to discover how many of its startups can survive that middle. Divya Verma, Chair of the HITLAB Women’s Health Tech Initiative, has spent two decades ensuring products succeed.
Throughout her nearly 20-year career in finance and pharmaceutical commercialization, Verma has been one of the first commercial hires brought in before a product pipeline existed. She turned a single branded launch into the proof point that unlocked private equity funding. She also strategized a first-to-file generic that generated $550 million in revenue within its first six months on the market. She has led over 25 product launches. Now, she’s applying that same discipline — the ability to spot a promising idea early and do the hard work to bring it to market — to a sector she believes is on the verge of a breakout moment.
“Women’s health has long been treated as a niche,” Verma said. “But when I look at this pipeline of startups, I see what I sought throughout my career in pharma: real unmet need, a genuine willingness from women to pay for and adopt better solutions, and founders who are building with true clinical and commercial discipline. That combination is what distinguishes a product that launches from one that scales. I’ve spent my whole career finding that combination — now I get to find it here.”
The Builder’s Instinct
When asked what separates a successful launch from an unsuccessful one, Verma doesn’t focus on big ideas. She emphasizes the unseen work: vendor negotiations, salesforce mapping, and due diligence. This is the skill she developed as one of the first commercial hires at Fosun Pharma USA, where there wasn’t yet a product on the market. She built the portfolio function herself, collaborating with teams in China and India to launch 13 products and grow revenue from zero to over $10 million in two years. This same skill was behind FIRVANQ, Azurity Pharmaceuticals’ first branded product launch, which generated $25 million in its first year and helped clear the regulatory path that ultimately attracted private equity investment.
“People assume the hard part is the idea,” Verma said. “The hard part is everything that follows — the licensing conversation, the regulatory timeline, the launch sequencing, the sales infrastructure. That’s where most promising products actually fail. I’ve built that infrastructure from scratch more than once, and I believe that’s exactly the kind of expertise women’s health innovation needs right now — not just capital, but people who know how to get a product from a pitch deck into a patient’s hands.”
Her grounding in commercial execution is paired with a financial rigor she developed during her early career — five years in investment banks before earning her MBA in Marketing and Finance from IE Business School in Madrid. This perspective informs every pipeline and M&A decision she makes today, having led business development negotiations across multiple products in her most recent role as Vice President at Accord Healthcare.
Why Women’s Health, Why Now
The conditions Verma has learned to recognize in pharma — genuine unmet need, patients ready to adopt better solutions, and founders with commercial discipline — are now present in women’s health. What has been lacking is not clinical urgency but commercial attention. The category has been systematically underinvested in relative to its opportunity, and that gap is finally closing.
“In pharma, I spent my career observing what happens when an underserved category finally receives serious commercial attention — innovation accelerates rapidly,” she said. “Women’s health is at that inflection point. The clinical need has always existed. What’s changing is the seriousness of the founders, the sophistication of the technology, and finally, the willingness of investors to treat this as a real market instead of a side category.”
As Chair of the Women’s Health Tech Initiative, Verma leads programming, judges startup pitch competitions, drives investor engagement, and chaired the Women’s Health track at the HITLAB 2026 Symposium. This work puts her in regular conversation with the founders building the next generation of women’s health solutions. For example, Divya was one of the judges for the HITLAB x Utah Valley University Pitch Day during which, BobiHealth, an AI-powered pregnancy tracking app that monitors expectant mothers’ symptoms and biometrics in real time to flag early warning signs of complications like preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, helping reduce preventable maternal and infant mortality.
“What I tell founders is the same thing I’d tell myself twenty years ago walking into a company with no product on the shelf yet,” Verma said. “Having the science right is just the starting point. The companies that succeed are the ones who also know how to build the essential elements — the go-to-market plan, the regulatory strategy, and the actual mechanics of getting from zero to scale. That’s what I’m here to help this next generation get right.”
For a sector long treated as a side category, that kind of help may be the difference between a promising pipeline and a transformed market.
Learn More about
Share the article:
