Nabta Health, a Dubai-based women’s health company, is up for a prestigious MedTech award, but its founder Sophie Smith has little interest in accolades.
“I don’t care about winning awards now,” she says, her tone matter-of-fact. “I just want to build.”
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
For the British entrepreneur, recognition is beside the point. After years refining her model, she believes she has finally cracked what she calls the “go-to-market nut”. Her focus now is on scaling Nabta’s vision of accessible, patient-centred healthcare for women in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
In a region better known for sovereign wealth megadeals and gleaming hospital infrastructure than preventive care reform, Smith is attempting something more structurally ambitious: redesigning healthcare around women – and in doing so reshaping how care is delivered across the Middle East and Africa.
Nabta Health, the hybrid healthcare company she founded, positions women not as a niche market but as the starting point for a broader overhaul of preventive medicine. “If you build a model that works for women,” Smith argues, “you build a universal model of preventive care.”
The claim is strategic rather than rhetorical. Healthcare systems globally remain built around episodic treatment, reimbursement constraints and clinical research historically dominated by male participants. In emerging markets, these structural limits are compounded by uneven insurance coverage and fragmented regulation.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataSmith’s thesis is that women fall through the gaps of this system in ways that are both systemic – and economically irrational.
A structural blind spot
Venture capital allocations reflect the imbalance. Globally, female-founded businesses receive a disproportionately small share of funding, and in the Middle East, there is still no specialist fund dedicated to women’s health. Later-stage capital tends to cluster around fintech and high-growth tech, while preventive care – particularly for women – is often treated as a social concern rather than an investable category.
Yet macroeconomics tells a different story. Women make the majority of household healthcare decisions and account for the bulk of caregiving worldwide. Failure to stabilise women’s health has ripple effects across families and labour markets.
More fundamentally, Sophie Smith argues that modern medicine has long been designed through what she calls a “male lens”: clinical trials skew male, symptom presentation is benchmarked against male physiology, and diagnostic tools are optimised accordingly. Applying a female lens to health – for women and men alike – reveals significant scientific gaps and, she says, substantial commercial opportunity.
“So much of medicine has been built around male physiology as the default,” Smith says. “When you apply a female lens instead, you realise how many biological systems we’ve barely studied – and how much opportunity that creates.”
Uncovering overlooked biology
Cervical screening illustrates the point. The pap smear was designed as a mechanical tool to examine the cervix, yet emerging research suggests menstrual blood may in some cases provide richer diagnostic insights – an avenue that has received relatively little attention.
Similar gaps exist in pregnancy and breastfeeding, where researchers have only recently identified hormones that protect – and even strengthen – maternal bone density despite the heavy mineral demands of gestation and lactation.
“It would be like designing chairs that collapse when women sit on them, or umbrellas that leak only when women use them – while working perfectly well for men. That’s effectively how healthcare works today. It’s absurd,” Smith says.
For her, these overlooked areas of female physiology point to a wider conclusion: studying women’s biology more directly could unlock new diagnostics and treatments far beyond women’s health alone.
From symptomatic to pre-symptomatic care
Nabta’s operating model seeks to move women upstream, before symptoms escalate.
Traditional healthcare systems wait for patients to present with fatigue, pain or irregularities. Smith contends that for women – particularly those balancing employment and caregiving – fatigue and discomfort are routinely normalised. By the time clinical intervention occurs, conditions such as breast cancer are frequently diagnosed at later stages.
Nabta’s healthcare platform instead anchors engagement around personal goals: weight management, stress reduction, energy levels. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven intake systems surface risk factors and likely symptom clusters based on age and life stage, prompting earlier screening and diagnostic intervention.
The model combines three layers:
- A licensed physical clinic to anchor regulatory compliance.
- A largely virtual network of general practitioners, nurses and allied health professionals delivering remote care.
- A B2B subscription model, primarily sold to employers as an add-on to insurance coverage.
The B2B focus is deliberate. Direct-to-consumer healthcare remains costly to acquire and difficult to scale in fragmented markets. Employers, by contrast, have incentives aligned with productivity, retention and healthcare cost containment – a proposition that is beginning to resonate with large regional corporates. Nabta now counts Emirates among its clients, a high-profile endorsement that validates both the enterprise model and the potential for wider regional adoption.
Preventive screening, Smith argues, can materially reduce long-term claims. Earlier cancer detection, for example, significantly lowers treatment costs while improving survival rates -an economic case that is increasingly compelling for insurers and corporate HR departments. Landing a client of Emirates’ scale, she says, demonstrates how women-centred preventive care can deliver measurable benefits across a workforce – and, by extension, across the broader healthcare system.
Navigating regulatory complexity
Building such a model in the Gulf has required institutional patience. Healthcare licensing frameworks were not designed for hybrid clinics combining digital triage, in-office diagnostics and AI-supported intake. Nabta operates across multiple regulatory entities, effectively “parceling up” components of its offering to fit within existing structures.
The friction has slowed early expansion but may also create a defensive moat. Healthcare regulation in the UAE is complex; navigating it confers embedded knowledge that new entrants may find difficult to replicate.
Beyond the UAE, the company is taking a country-by-country approach across the Middle East and Africa. The region is often treated as a homogenous bloc by investors; Smith rejects that framing. Health infrastructure, reimbursement structures and cultural attitudes vary widely between Gulf states, North Africa and sub-Saharan markets.
Scaling, she acknowledges, will be gradual. But emerging diagnostic devices – including portable breast ultrasounds are promising and could shift imaging from hospital radiology suites into more accessible settings.
Technology therefore, is presented as infrastructure, not identity. “The more efficient the system becomes, the more we can reduce costs,” she says. Efficiency, in this context, is what enables affordability – and scale.
Cultural change as commercial strategy
Women’s health in the region has historically been constrained by social taboos, particularly around reproductive and pelvic health. Smith believes generational shifts are creating new demand. Younger women are more open to discussing menopause, postpartum recovery and hormonal mental health.
Nabta has positioned itself as both service provider and ecosystem catalyst, contributing to regional initiatives such as the GCC Menopause Summit. Visibility matters: what was once marginal is increasingly entering mainstream corporate health conversations.
Yet funding remains a bottleneck. Nabta has raised a few million dollars to date and is in the process of closing an additional tranche. Regional investors, Smith suggests, still require proof points. The absence of large-scale exits in Middle Eastern women’s health creates a familiar catch-22: success stories are needed to unlock capital, but capital is needed to produce success stories.
In the United States, where several women’s health companies have achieved significant scale in recent years, the category has gained credibility. Smith expects a similar – if delayed – inflection point in the Gulf.
Institution-building over arbitrage
Advisers have suggested that Nabta relocate its holding company to the US or UK to ease fundraising. Smith has resisted. Correcting representation gaps for Middle Eastern, African and South Asian women, she argues, requires building where those populations are the majority, not the minority.
It is a slower path, but potentially a more defensible one.
If Nabta succeeds, it will not simply be as a clinic network. It will be as a template: a modular, preventive, hybrid model that can be localised across disparate health systems.
The broader bet is that women’s health is not a side category but the foundation of system-wide reform. In regions where insurance penetration is uneven and public health budgets are stretched, preventive infrastructure may prove more scalable than hospital expansion.
For now, Nabta remains early in that trajectory. But as employers confront rising claims costs and governments grapple with demographic transitions, the economics of prevention are becoming harder to ignore.
In that recalibration, women – long treated as a subcategory – may finally take centre stage.
“Women are the pillar of society,” says Smith. “Empower their health, and you uplift everyone around them.”
Women’s health by the numbers
- Representation gap: Women now comprise a slight majority of clinical trial participants (≈56% in some FDA data), but the majority are white (78% between 2015–2019), leaving women of color underrepresented.
- Underrepresented groups: Women from African, Asian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds remain consistently excluded relative to their disease burden, limiting the generalisability of research findings.
- Economic opportunity: Closing the women’s health gap could improve health outcomes, boost workforce participation, and raise per capita GDP by an estimated 1.7%, according to the World Economic Forum.
- Funding gap: All-female founding teams receive just 2.3% of global venture capital ($6.7 billion in 2025), reflecting persistent underinvestment in women-led health innovation.
