Women founders to Times Square: why this moment mattered
Muuza being featured on the NASDAQ Tower in Times Square marked more than a milestone - it symbolized women founders building serious, data-driven solutions in a space that has long been overlooked: women’s health.
Last week, Muuza appeared on the NASDAQ Tower in Times Square. Visually: bright lights, massive screens. Emotionally: quiet pride, a bit of disbelief, and a strong sense of this is bigger than us.
This moment wasn’t just about startup visibility. It was about women building for women and doing it seriously, responsibly, and out in the open.
Our journey through Kickstart Lab started in August with ~100 teams. Many were strong. Many were ambitious. But only a handful were working in spaces that are still systematically underfunded, under-discussed, and over-simplified - women’s health being one of them.
Building in women’s health is different. You’re not just pitching a market - you’re pushing against decades of medical blind spots, cultural discomfort, and solutions that are either too vague or too confident for problems that are neither.
Kickstart Lab forced us to sharpen not only what we’re building at Muuza, but why it needs to exist at all. We had to articulate:
why women deserve better diagnostic signals, not guesswork
why “just Google it” is unsafe in intimate health
and why responsible AI in healthcare should sometimes say “we’re not sure—see a clinician”
By the final stage, 12 teams pitched, and 3 startups shared the prize. Standing there as women founders, working in women’s health, and seeing our work later projected in Times Square felt symbolic in the best way.
Not because it’s flashy, but because it signals that women’s health is no longer niche, and women founders don’t need to build “cute” products to be taken seriously.
This wasn’t a finish line. It was visibility for a category that has stayed in the shadows for too long and fuel to keep building carefully, ethically, and with purpose.