Hong Kong-based femtech founder runs thriving start-up Luüna Naturals, fights to eradicate ‘period poverty’ across Asia
- Olivia Cotes-James founded Luüna Naturals, one of Hong Kong’s first, and biggest, femtech companies
- The company has worked with offices and schools to dispense free menstrual products to over 300,000 users
Olivia Cotes-James founded one of Hong Kong’s first femtech companies, Luüna Naturals, in 2019 after a decade of navigating troubling menstrual symptoms.
After building her start-up into one of the city’s biggest femtech players, she turned her attention to eradicating period poverty – the lack of access to menstrual products – across Asia, work which in 2021 landed her on the Forbes 30 under 30.
As an early-stage start-up, Cotes-James raised over US$1 million in seed funding between 2019 and 2021 through individual investors from Hong Kong and Shanghai.
“Finding them was not easy,” she said. “I was a first-time founder with no traction, I do not have the knowledge and certainly not the network.”
She met a lot of resistance from investors of both genders, because the topic is so stigmatised. “A lot of the people we were pitching to never had someone walk into a room and talk about something that was so awkward, so that was very challenging,” she said.
