Menopause is having a moment—and Hollywood icon Halle Berry is helping propel the movement.
The Academy Award winning actress just announced the launch of her menopause and women’s health care platform Respin Health which aims to redefine—or re-spin—menopause through science, community, and tech. Berry first launched Respin in 2020 as a wellness platform but has now rebranded it to more directly target women’s health and longevity.
Menopause and perimenopause may be the “entry point for women,” Berry tells Fortune. But the goal of Respin is to “help women stay in their best health throughout the entirety of their life.”
The subscription platform offers coaches and clinicians who can provide advice for managing menopause symptoms, access to a community of other women who can help support one another, and science-backed nutrition and fitness information. A premium service offers personalized health plans for users who share their data.
Berry believes that Respin’s community feature is a differentiator in the crowded menopause market. It’s also critical to women’s success on the program. “Community is everything,” Berry says. “Scientifically, we know that when people can talk to other like-minded people and connect, they have better health outcomes.”
In a pilot program, 90% of participants in the Respin program reported their symptoms improved, with 64% of members having a clinically significant improvement after two months as members of the platform.
Filling a gap in women’s health care
From the main stage to the nation’s capital, where she advocated for the bipartisan Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act, Berry has been vocal about the lack of education on the realities of menopause—which about 1.3 million women in the U.S. enter every year. Many of these women struggle to find adequate information on menopause and appropriate care, and frequently fear speaking out about it in the face of pervasive sexist and ageist stereotypes, particularly in the workplace.
Berry herself was in perimenopause (the transition between reproductive viability and menopause) for 10 years without knowing it; after seeing a doctor to have her symptoms evaluated, the actress was wrongly diagnosed with herpes, she shared at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif., in October. For her, the episode illustrated the sad reality of women’s health: It is underrecognized, underfunded, and underresearched.
“This is a human rights issue,” Berry said at the summit. “We deserve more.”
Berry is hoping Respin will be one piece in the puzzle to helping improve health outcomes for women. “I have what I think are really great doctors, and if I had so little information, I knew that other women must have the same little to no information and that turning Respin into a platform to respin menopause would really be filling a gap,” Berry says.
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Menopause care is not only an essential missing element for women’s whole health but a ripe market. Within 10 years, the U.S. is projected to have more adults aged 50 and older than those aged 18 and younger. No surprise, then, that femtech innovations, especially in the roughly $17 billion global menopause market, are projected to have the highest growth rate, as experts shared at the Longevity Investors Conference this fall.
Berry previously told Fortune in October that “it was really hard to get people, largely men, at some of these venture capital companies to believe that menopause was a real thing.” But this week, Respin announced backing from legendary Silicon Valley outfit Khosla Ventures, alongside Night Ventures, Range Media Partners, Precursor Ventures & Able Partners.
“We invest in companies that are bold, early, and impactful and are often the first check into companies,” says Samir Kaul, the founding partner and managing director at Khosla Ventures, an early investor in OpenAI and DoorDash. “Respin is at the forefront of a major shift in the health and wellness space, creating highly personalized solutions for menopause and wellness that empower women to take control of their well-being.”
After several decades as a sought-after actress, Berry is excited for her “second act” as an entrepreneur. “It’s a new phase in my life. It’s a new challenge. It gives me a chance to continue to learn, and I get to share the information with other women,” she says.
And she’s hoping her work will help transform how we think about going through midlife, as “a time of life that we can look forward to and not dread,” she says. “I’m thinking of how my daughter is 17 now. I really believe that with the work that’s starting now, by the time she gets into her forties, her generation won’t be feeling like I felt, and my mother felt, and her mother felt. They’ll be ready.”
More on women’s health:
- Gen Xers demand menopause hormone drugs, and they won’t take no for an answer
- Will you have a stroke? These 17 factors—9 just for women—can be predictors
- A group of women lowered their biological age by an average of 5 years in just 8 weeks. Here’s how
