Halfway through our interview, Amber Vodegel’s 16-year-old daughter texted to ask for a lift. She was sitting in the same room. Amber was mid-sentence and didn’t reply, so a handwritten note arrived instead, with tick boxes for yes and no. Amber ticked yes, then broke off to explain it would have to be after five, because she had one more meeting.
For many female founders, this is what building a business looks like.
Amber has been building healthtech companies for the better part of two decades. She bootstrapped her first company, Pregnancy+, without investors or a network, while raising a family, before selling it to Philips in 2017. Pregnancy+ has since gone on to reach 150 million users worldwide.
In 2023 she started again with the women’s health platform 28X, backed by £1.2 million from the Philips Foundation and angel investors — and by a list of the things she wishes she’d known the first time.
Capital, networks and time constrain every high-growth female founder in the UK. Amber has worked around all three twice.
What we discussed
How she bootstrapped Pregnancy+ without knowing that grants or investment existed, sold the business to Philips and saw the product go on to reach 150 million users worldwide.
Why she started again after the Philips exit, and the book that shaped what she built next.
How 28X stays free for every user.
Her proposal for a basic certificate before you can register a company.
Lessons for policymakers
Reform grant assessment panels to include entrepreneurs. Amber argues that assessors, often drawn from research backgrounds, are trained to reward long feasibility studies over founders who say a problem can be solved quickly. A panel split between an entrepreneur, a researcher and a policy specialist would change who gets funded, and for what.
Exempt care costs from benefit-in-kind tax for scaling companies. Employer-paid childcare, school care and elderly care are taxed as a standard benefit, so the employee pays income tax on the value and the company pays Class 1A National Insurance on top. She would exempt high-growth companies from that treatment on care costs.
Give Companies House a teaching job. There’s no basic knowledge requirement to register a company. Plain-language videos on what alternative capital is, which sort suits which company and what grants exist would point founders in the right direction.
Lessons for founders
Constraints buy you the right to say no. Bootstrapping let her turn down beauty-product sponsorships aimed at pregnant users, which she doubts she could have done under investor pressure.
Ask what your kind of capital demands in return. Venture and private equity suit some businesses but not others, and most founders treat money simply as money.
Architecture is a business model decision. Because 28X runs on-device with no cloud back end, there’s no incremental cost per user. One woman or 100 million costs the same, which is what makes free viable.
The founding story
You bootstrapped Pregnancy+ without investors or a network, sold it to Philips in 2017, and the product has since reached 150 million users worldwide. Six years later, you started again from scratch. Why?
I bootstrapped the first company simply because I didn’t know funding existed. I made some money, put it back in and made some more. I never joined a network or went to an event. I worked in complete isolation. I had no idea what I was doing in terms of preparing for an exit, structuring the company or getting a grant. I just wanted to make the best product there was for our users.
I learned a lot at Philips over the years that followed the exit. We integrated with Medicaid in the US and went deeper into low-income countries, where Philips is excellent.
After I left Philips, I read Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition. It argues that the biggest waste of our generation is ‘a waste of talent’, that our best mathematicians are spending their brains on dopamine triggers and TikTok feeds when they should be working on climate change and cancer. Everyone follows the money. Everyone wants to be the next big tech entrepreneur, no matter the effect their product has on society.
Today’s tech products are often venture-backed, which means the user pays one way or another. The best period trackers cost £4 to £8 a month. That’s fine for a small percentage of affluent women. Unfortunately for a lot of women and girls, it simply isn’t affordable.
Imagine a 14-year-old girl from a low-income household where English isn’t her first language, who wants to track her period and understand her own body. She downloads an app and immediately hits a paywall. We treat that as normal. And if she doesn’t pay, her data gets shared instead, or she’ll be exposed to endless advertising. One way or the other, investors need to see a return on their investment, so the user becomes ‘the product’.
So I thought: let’s rethink the healthtech space. We’re building a women’s health app with no subscription and no data business behind it. We don’t use cloud servers at the back end, so we can’t access your data ourselves. We give women back the power over their own data, without having to pay for it. Your body. Your data. Your choice.
If there’s no subscription and no data being sold, what pays for 28X?
The good news is that if you don’t have cloud servers, you don’t have costs that scale. Our core technology costs don’t rise in proportion to the number of users, which fundamentally changes the economics. You download the same binary from the store onto your phone, and everything happens on-device. You can still share your data with your GP if you want, or back it up to your own Google Drive or email. It’s your own safe, not mine. There isn’t a meaningful incremental infrastructure cost attached to each additional user.
That’s the first part: we’ve dropped the cloud, and the costs that come with it. The second part is sponsors, the same way I did it with Pregnancy+. You can make tens of millions a year from ESG sponsorships that actually mean something. Educational partnerships, for example, and health solutions and products that are genuinely useful to women.
What did bootstrapping force you to do differently?
I think you become more creative. There’s less pressure, and you end up in a more ethical position, too. At Pregnancy+, before we were acquired, we were offered certain sponsorships that I didn’t think were helpful. Beauty-enhancement products, mostly. When you’re pregnant, you should be focused on life — your mental health, your social network — not worrying about your appearance. We were offered substantial sponsorships like that quite early on. If we’d been VC-backed, I don’t think I could have said no.
Bootstrapping gives you much more space to make the right decisions. You also have time, so you cut fewer corners on security and privacy. If getting it right takes a month longer, there’s nobody telling you it has to ship by June.
Venture capital is wonderful for certain businesses, but definitely not for all of them, and the same goes for private equity. There’s very little education on that. People see money as money. They just think, “I need money”, without knowing what it means or what the consequences are.
What she didn’t know
You built Pregnancy+ without knowing that funding, grants or networks existed. What needs to change so the next generation doesn’t have to learn it the hard way?
I think entrepreneurship should be on the school curriculum. It’s going to be huge, because in this new world, everyone can build anything with AI. You’ll see lots of micro-companies starting up, each doing something very specific for one area.
My co-founder’s son is 13. Over a few weekends he built a game — AI lets you do that now. He can now invite his school friends to play, and in return they invite another school to play against them. So now you’ve got kids in Guildford schools playing a game together, and they like it more than playing something global like Roblox, where you have no idea who you’re playing against. You’ll get far more companies built for a local purpose, and some of them will turn out to be valuable.
But those kids, in those schools, need to know what’s actually available to them in the UK, and how to access it. That’s where it has to start.
So where should that information come from?
Look at what happens when you register a limited company with Companies House. There’s no basic knowledge test, the way there is for almost everything else you’re allowed to do. You need a theory exam for a driving licence. You need a PADI qualification before you’re allowed to scuba dive. But you can set up a company with no understanding of what you’re getting into at all.
Companies House could put out a series of plain-language videos. One in seven adults in England has literacy skills at or below the level expected of a nine- to 11-year-old, so explain it at that level. This is what alternative capital is. This is what’s good for which kind of company, and why it’s not suited to others. These are the grants you can apply for. Just enough to point people in the right direction.
I’d push for some kind of basic certificate. At the moment starting a company is like having a child. Everyone says good luck, and that’s the training.
What needs to change
You want childcare treated differently for growing companies. What’s the thinking?
If you’re a growing company with a good revenue track record, you’re bringing new money into the country, because you’re selling a product or a service. Those are the building blocks of society. You have surplus value.
I think companies above a revenue growth threshold — set it at 20%, or tier it — should be able to claim care costs back, whether that’s childcare or elderly care. I think that makes total sense. With all of these suggestions, there are always people who find ways around the system, so it’s difficult to do perfectly. But there must be something we can do, especially for women, around childcare that you can claim as a benefit.
You’ve also mentioned proposing a minimum proportion of government spend going to UK-based companies. What’s the example that makes the case for you?
Take AI scribe software for GPs, the kind that allows a doctor to focus on the patient rather than typing throughout the consultation, with the conversation captured and the relevant information added to the system automatically.
When public bodies procure technology like this, I think there should be much more consideration given to where the economic value ultimately goes. It is not just about where a company employs people, but where the ownership sits, where the money flows and whether we are helping to build capability in the UK.
Supporting British companies should be a factor in those decisions. There should be a requirement for a meaningful proportion of public and grant-funded spending to remain in the UK. If a company has received an Innovate UK grant, for example, there should also be an expectation that a reasonable share of that funding is spent with UK subcontractors and suppliers. I think Innovate UK is already relatively good at encouraging that.
Quotas draw pushback. How do you answer it?
You do get that, and I see it. But maybe you frame it as either UK-based or female, like setting a few really important pillars, rather than one narrow box. That’s the only way to get people moving in that direction, if there are mandates around where the money goes.
I don’t think you can just hand money out. But you can set guidelines where a company has to tick some of those boxes — UK-based, female-founded, whatever the pillars are — so it falls into one of those categories rather than being excluded outright. If you do it that way, you don’t end up with a group of people against you.
You’ve said government grant programmes, including Innovate UK, tend to favour applicants from research or institutional backgrounds. What did you mean by that?
I didn’t know any of this until I won a grant myself. I’m getting better at them now, but the mechanism is revealing. In my experience, the process can feel heavily weighted towards research and institutional thinking, and I’d like to see more successful entrepreneurs represented on assessment panels.
So when I wrote my first submissions, I’d say something like: I only need this much money, and I can get you that much return, by just doing these three things. Very simple. They didn’t like that wording at all. They really don’t like it when you say it’s easy, that you can just do it, because that’s seen as far too entrepreneurial.
Every grant writer told me the same thing: say the idea is high-risk, say you have no idea whether it’ll work, ask for a feasibility study, then another, possibly a third. And always include well-known research partners as part of your funding proposal. That’s the setup and wording most assessors prefer.
What would a better process look like?
I’d want assessor panels to include a successful serial entrepreneur alongside someone from a research background and someone from policy. The three of them vote together. Right now, successful serial entrepreneurs are missing from these panels entirely.
Closing thoughts
What’s one thing you’ve read, listened to or come across recently that you’d recommend to readers?
I was really impressed by an article about Thuria Wenbar in The Times.
I know her personally, and I think the best businesses are built on strong ethics and a genuine desire to solve real problems.
She wanted to help improve access to healthcare, so she founded an online pharmacy and digital healthcare business. Through the service, people can complete a clinical assessment online and, where appropriate, receive treatment following review by a qualified healthcare professional. The information can also be shared with their GP to help support continuity of care.
I used the service this morning to request travel health support ahead of a safari in a high-risk malaria area. I completed the assessment online, and the relevant information was shared with my GP.
She’s a female founder who set out to improve the system and built a business to do exactly that. What makes her story even more remarkable is her journey. She was an asylum seeker, fleeing first to Egypt, then Germany, before arriving in the UK at the age of eight. She is one of many extraordinary women who have come to the UK from around the world and built businesses that make a real difference.
When you read a story like hers, an asylum seeker, a doctor, now running a technology business, you might think, how brilliant is that? But I suspect there is still a tendency in the UK to ask why someone like her did not simply stay in medicine.
The point is that she has not stepped away from healthcare; she has found a different way to contribute to it. She is solving a real problem, building something the NHS did not have, creating technology that can support patients and clinicians, and developing intellectual property that could ultimately be exported and licensed into other health systems.
We should be much more comfortable celebrating people who use their expertise to build companies, create jobs and solve public service problems at scale.
This series is run in partnership with the Jessica Vollman Foundation, a non-profit founded to honour the legacy of the late CEO, founder and advocate for women in entrepreneurship: Jessica Vollman.