WoW Woman in Femtech - Nina van Schaick, co-founder and COO of Peripear
Nina van Schaick is the co-founder and COO of Peripear, an Oxford-based medtech startup building the world's first automated perineal thermotherapy wearable to reduce perineal trauma during vaginal childbirth. Before co-founding Peripear, she spent 14 years working as an NHS and private midwife, an experience that gave her direct, repeated exposure to the gap between well-established clinical evidence on warm compress therapy and its inconsistent delivery on labour wards. She trained at Oxford Brookes University.
Under her leadership, Peripear closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round backed by HERmesa, SyndicateRoom, Zinc VC, and SIE Ventures, and secured an Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award alongside a Growth Catalyst and Biomedical Catalyst grant. The company also won the NatWest Accelerator Oxford Pitch Competition and holds a granted patent, with an international (PCT) filing underway. Peripear is preparing for a first-in-human study at the National University Hospital System in Singapore.
Nina is driven by professional frustration and the desire to improve birth outcomes for women and families. When it became clear that the evidence for preventing perineal trauma has existed for decades, and it was being left out of clinical pathways simply because no standardised tool existed to deliver it, Nina had to act. Outside of Peripear, she enjoys being in nature, wild swimming, and spending time with her family.
Peripear is developing the world's first automated perineal thermotherapy wearable, designed to reduce perineal trauma during vaginal childbirth. Perineal tearing affects the large majority of women who give birth vaginally, yet evidence for a solution, warm compress therapy, has existed for decades without a consistent, hands-free way to deliver it on busy labour wards. Founded by a midwife with 14 years of frontline experience, Peripear translates this proven intervention into a purpose-built wearable that supports clinicians to apply the evidence every time. The Oxford-based company is backed by Innovate UK, HERmesa, SyndicateRoom, Zinc VC, and SIE Ventures.
Tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.
I spent 14 years as a midwife before I became a founder. I trained at Oxford Brookes, and I have been privileged to spend my career in a wide range of settings —labour wards, birth centres, and homes—catching babies at all hours and doing my best for women in one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
Perineal trauma, tearing during childbirth, is common. It’s something we see and communicate to women as “just part of birth”. I’ve seen the immense impact this injury can have on women, families and our wider society and I came to question why we have normalised this as just another thing women have to accept as inevitable.
Unusually in women’s health, we actually have the data to back a mechanism to reduce these injuries. Most of the time we have the problem, have to create a dataset and THEN iterate a solution. In the case of perineal care in the pushing phase of labour, we have had evidence to support the use of moist heat (warm compresses) for over a decade. Actually, this is traditional, ancient midwifery knowledge well documented since ancient Greece and Egypt. But when I looked around as a clinical midwife for the standardised tool to apply this equitably across all births, I found this huge implementation gap. Improvised devices are reaching less than 15% of births.
That gap is why I co-founded Peripear with Eviatar Natan, a long-time friend with a background in science and building healthtech businesses. We're building the world's first automated perineal thermotherapy wearable, a device that delivers controlled, continuous warmth to reduce perineal trauma, while still letting the clinician maintain proper tactile access. It's the clinical insight from the ward, engineered into something a hospital can actually use at scale.
How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
I didn't set out to be a medtech founder; I set out to be a good midwife, and Peripear grew out of frustration with a problem I lived both professionally and personally (as a woman who has given birth twice). Moving from clinical practice into hardware, regulatory pathways, and fundraising has been a genuinely steep climb. Nobody teaches you TAM/SAM/SOM on a labour ward. I've had to learn regulatory strategy, IP, cap tables, and investor relations essentially from scratch, while still being the person in the room who understands the clinical reality better than anyone else.
Femtech (for however long we are continuing to use that term) and birthtech specifically are still underinvested categories, so part of the challenge has been convincing investors that a problem affecting the majority of people who give birth vaginally is not a niche market; it's just been historically ignored.
How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle? What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in?
It's been nearly three years from first sketching the idea to where we are now, from a rough concept born out of frustration on the labour ward to a company with three Innovate UK grants awarded, patents granted and a first-in-human study scheduled for H2 2027
The biggest obstacle has honestly been translation, taking something I understood intuitively as a midwife and turning it into a device that satisfies engineers, regulators, and investors simultaneously, none of whom speak quite the same language. I love talking about the physiology of birth, and so getting to work with all of these different perspectives has been hugely enjoyable.
And of course, let’s talk about the challenges of raising in the mighty trifecta of risk: Women’s health, hardware AND a regulated medical device. We are literally in the centre of the Venn diagram, and that has felt frustrating at times. Our angels, our investors and supporters have believed in the team and the market, and together we have done incredible things.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
Raising in the current climate feels massive. We have just closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round backed by HERmesa, SyndicateRoom, Zinc VC, and SIE Ventures. We won Innovate UK's Women in Innovation Award and the NatWest Accelerator Oxford Pitch Competition, and between those and our Innovate UK grants, we've secured over £500k in non-dilutive funding. We also have a granted Israeli patent, with a PCT filing underway, and we're preparing for a first-in-human study at NUHS Singapore in 2027.
But if I'm honest, the achievement I'm proudest of is less measurable: building a team and a company culture around a genuinely critical mission, and being intentional every step of the way. We are about to embark on a really steep period of growth and scale. I’ve really put the emphasis on taking the time post-raise to focus, build the structures and plan what the next phase looks like.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
Right now the focus is threefold: preparing for our first-in-human study in Singapore, progressing FDA 510(k) and HSA regulatory pathways in parallel, and building out our team as we grow. We're currently in the hiring process for both a Chief of Staff/Ops role and a Marketing Coordinator.
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
Yes, unreservedly. I came into tech from midwifery, a profession that is over 99% female and still chronically under-resourced, and I've landed in an industry where the reverse is often true: overwhelmingly male-led, building products for a female population it doesn't always understand. #WomenInTech matters to me because representation changes what gets built, not just who builds it. If more women are in the room, as founders, engineers, investors, the right conversations happen and huge problems like perineal trauma get tackled head-on.
What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?
I think three things converge over the next five years: wearables stop being consumer-wellness adjacent and start being properly clinical-grade, women’s health stops being treated as an afterthought and gets capitalised like the serious category it is, and hospitals start demanding devices that reduce clinician burden instead of adding to it.
I'd also push back a bit on the assumption that AI is where all the innovation is going to come from. It's had a lot of the airtime in healthtech lately, but some of the biggest gaps in care aren't algorithmic; they're about delivery. Perineal trauma is a good example; we've had the clinical evidence for decades. The barrier was never a lack of data. It was that nobody built the physical tool to actually deliver that care at the bedside, consistently, every time. There's real room over the next five years for hardware that closes gaps like that, not just software bolted onto existing care.
My hope is that the companies who win are the ones designing for an overstretched workforce, not just the patient in isolation. And I'd like to see more clinicians get the chance to solve the gaps they're already seeing on the ground; right now there just aren't enough pathways to take that frustration and turn it into something real.
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
Start from the problem you've actually witnessed, not the technology you find exciting. My unfair advantage in this industry isn't a hardware background; it's 14 years of seeing the same problem treated as an afterthought despite wide acknowledgement of a preventative mechanism. If you're coming from a clinical or frontline background into tech, don't discount that experience as "just" your day job. It's the most valuable dataset you have.
Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?
It's hard to narrow this to three, but a few names come to mind for very different reasons.
Marina Gerner deserves a mention here of all places; her book, The Vagina Business, is the first mainstream, deeply reported account of femtech, built from a hundred interviews across fifteen countries. What I admire most is that she kept pitching it after being told the subject was "too niche," and that persistence helped put the investment gap in this sector on the map in a way a hundred pitch decks alone never could.
Amanda Ducach, founder and CEO of Ema, is someone I admire for building a genuinely capital-efficient, clinically grounded AI platform for women's health, and then going further to co-found the Women's Health AI Consortium to push for real standards in a space that's moving faster than the guardrails around it.
Dr Andrea Braden, an OB-GYN at Atlanta Birth Center, is someone I admire from the clinical side rather than the founder side; she's exactly the kind of frontline clinician Peripear is built for, and having her clinical and founder perspective in our own development process has been incredible on this journey.
And if I can sneak in a couple more: Anna-Luisa Schaffgotsch, founder and CEO of Impli, who's tackling one of the hardest unsolved problems in femtech, continuous hormone monitoring, after years of foundational biosensor work. Watching her push through an "ARPA-hard" technical problem in a category most investors still underestimate is exactly the kind of persistence this industry needs more of.
And Sânziana Foia, founder of Papcup, who turned her own uncomfortable experience with a smear test into an at-home HPV screening device using menstrual blood, the kind of "why has nobody fixed this obvious thing" insight I recognise from my own path into Peripear. Happily, we have crossed paths both on the Accelerating Femtech Programme in 2025 and this year are both awardees of the Innovate UK Women in Innovation awards. Just recognition for her incredible persistence, innovation and mission.
