Less than 2% success rate: Learning to ‘speak dude’ to venture capitalists as a female health founder

Venture capital thrives on bold ideas, but women founders still face uneven ground. 

According to Deloitte, 22% of Australian startups are founded by women, yet female-led companies received only 2% of venture capital investment in 2022, according to the World Economic Forum. 

For Dr Merran Cooper, founder of Touchstone Life Care, those statistics are more than numbers – they’ve shaped her entrepreneurial journey. Her platform, which securely stores and shares people’s end-of-life wishes via a QR code, has been praised by clinicians, families, and government stakeholders. But when it came to raising capital, the feedback was often the same: great idea, not enough revenue.

Turning compassion into capital

Touchstone Life Care was born from Merran’s own experience, first as a carer for her terminally ill husband, and later as a doctor treating patients whose wishes weren’t always known.

“We were treating people when they’d lost consciousness or had a stroke,” she recalls. “We’d have to use our best guess about what they might want. And that usually meant the safest option for the doctor was to do what was necessary to avoid getting sued. So we’d overtreat, even at the end of life, instead of making people comfortable.”

The solution was both personal and practical: a digital, shareable platform that lets doctors, paramedics, aged care providers and family members know exactly what care a patient would want.

Merran built her minimum viable product using $40,000 of her own savings, later securing a $25,000 NSW MVP Grant. The platform launched quietly, but soon more than 4,500 Australians completed an advance care plan online.

“It didn’t seem like much at the time,” she says. “But people told me that was huge with no marketing budget.”

Plans were soon underway to turn the free tool into a paid service and attract a B2B audience by targeting aged care providers as well as individuals.

Then COVID-19 hit, and progress stopped. “You couldn’t advertise something like ‘plan for your death’ in the middle of a pandemic,” she says. “And without revenue, no one will fund you.”

Still, she pressed on, refining and rebuilding the platform and preparing to pitch for the investment she needed to grow.

Learning to pitch – and to listen

“I had no idea what an enterprise-grade product even was,” Merran laughs. “I just knew that’s what large providers wanted. So I started learning — from anyone who’d talk to me.”

She eventually raised $550,000 from family, friends and social impact investors, but only after one of her advisors taught her the harsh reality of pitching.

“He’d say, ‘You’re boring me. You’re boring me. I don’t get it.’ It was brutal – but it was exactly what I needed,” she recalls. “You can’t just pitch to people who think you’re wonderful. You need someone who’ll interrupt and say, ‘Stop telling me about your product. Tell me about the numbers.’”

That feedback shifted her mindset from caring clinician to business-focused founder.

“The people funding you don’t have your patients’ best interests at heart. They want to know how much money they’ll make,” she realised. “So I had to learn how to talk about money first – not care, not social good, but revenue and profit.”

It’s a perspective shaped by her own fundraising journey, rather than a critique of every investor. It’s what she now calls learning to “speak dude.”

“I tended to talk in detail – how it works, why it matters. I noticed that men, when they pitch, tended to boil it all down to big numbers: market size, share captured, revenue. That’s the language investors understand.”

Bias, barriers and a business built on purpose

Over several years, Merran pitched to around a hundred venture capital investors, most of them men. The response rarely changed: great founder, great product, come back when you have more revenue.

But generating revenue was far from simple. Aged care providers were still navigating COVID recovery, workforce shortages and ongoing regulatory uncertainty. They liked the product, yet hesitated to act while waiting for clarity.

“Initially, they were waiting for the Royal Commission’s findings, then for new regulations, then for legislation that would force them to act. That has taken years.”

Meanwhile, she watched younger male founders raise millions with far less detailed pitches. To Merran, this reflected track record and familiarity rather than capability.

“I think the most successful raises were from groups who had already succeeded in other domains outside health,” she says. “They had previously raised $2 to $5 million, had a successful exit and were coming back to do it again, bigger and better in health. They were raising multiple tens of millions on an idea rather than ARR.”

For her, the takeaway is practical: female founders benefit from partners who have been through scale and can demonstrate it to investors.

“If you are a female founder in health, you need a team beside you that can show investors you know how to scale,” she says. “If you look at successful female founders, many have come out of previous high growth environments such as Canva, where they have seen scale up close.”

Her investment journey mirrored what she saw across the health system itself: good ideas often struggle to find clear pathways in environments built for caution rather than speed.

System wide challenges in a system not built for speed

That tension became clearer as Merran began engaging with government stakeholders. She demonstrated her platform to members of both sides of government, many of whom immediately recognised the problem it solved. Yet available funding had already been allocated to government-appointed officers, and she was advised to apply through those bodies instead.

What followed was a frustrating loop. When she approached those national agencies, they told her they viewed her as a “competitor” for funding. The contradiction was stark. A solution that aligned with national strategies and addressed a system-wide problem appeared valuable in theory, but securing the resources to scale remained out of reach.

The experience underscored a broader truth: in health, even when an idea is clinically sound and strategically aligned, the pathways for adoption can be slow, fragmented and easily blocked. For a founder trying to build momentum, those structural delays can be as limiting as the investment barriers themselves.

Learning to “kill your babies”

Merran has also learned the hard art of adaptation – what she calls “killing your babies.” 

Her original vision for Touchstone Life Care was a beautifully comprehensive, intelligent tool for creating meaningful advance care plans. But as she puts it, “people didn’t want clever.” Governments wanted standardised forms, aged care providers wanted compliance, and funders wanted simplicity. 

“So I had to stop being innovative and just solve the accessibility problem,” she says. 

“They don’t care how good the document is – they just need to find it at 3 a.m.” That shift, from building what people need to what they’re willing to pay for, was painful but pivotal.” 

“You have to listen,” she says. “Revenue is just another form of feedback – it tells you what people truly value.”

Overnight success takes a decade

Now, nine and a half years into her founder journey, Merran has yet to secure venture capital funding but she hasn’t given up. 

“There are days I’ve cried,” she admits “But you learn to get up and keep going – because no one else will do it for you. People say it’s about timing but it’s really about staying until the world catches up.”

She notes that timing has to be right for investors rather than inventors or industry. “They’re just looking for that hockey-stick curve and trying to pick the right moment,” she says. For Touchstone Life Care, it might come once new legislation takes effect in November 2025 compelling aged care providers to improve their end-of-life care processes.

In the meantime, Merran’s shifted her focus to forming strategic partnerships with experienced businessmen (and they are all men) who bring skills in operations, finance, and cybersecurity to help her develop a sustainable business.

Advancing change for female founders in healthcare

When asked what could make a difference for women founders in healthcare, Merran’s answer is immediate.

“Blind pitches,” she says. “Don’t show who’s presenting – just let the ideas speak. That would immediately remove bias and let the facts speak for themselves.”

Some journals now use double-blind peer review processes to reduce unconscious bias in medical research, ensuring reviews do not know researchers’ names, genders or institutions – perhaps it’s time these ideas gained traction in the venture capital world. It’s one of several reforms she believes could help reduce bias in venture capital – a debate gaining traction across the global startup ecosystem.

Crucially, more women with the power to invest. “We need women who have money in their pockets, who can back other women. Because that’s how the system shifts,” she says.

Many women in left-leaning politics have benefitted from EMILY’s List, which stands for ‘Early money is like yeast’ because it makes the dough rise. EMILY’s List provides financial support to female candidates early in their campaigns to help them build momentum and attract more funding. Again, something similar could be done within venture capitalism. 

Nearly a decade in, Dr Merran Cooper’s story is one of determination, adaptability and quiet defiance. Her experience exposes both the resilience required to build a business in healthcare and the systemic bias that keeps women at the margins of investment. 

The journey doesn’t claim to speak for every female founder, but it captures an experience shared by many building purpose-led healthcare businesses today.

Merran is still working, still pitching, still proving that for-purpose and for-profit can coexist. And while she may have had to “learn to speak dude,” the world would be better if more people stopped to listen.

Her story offers one lens on what it takes to build with purpose in a system still catching up – and why hearing more voices like this matters.