Marissa Fayer brings an engineer’s perspective to her role as a CEO. The top executive at DeepLook Medical, a New York-based medical imaging company focused on women’s health, started her career as a manufacturing engineer. As she rose through the ranks of medical device companies, she said this engineering background has been pivotal to her development into the CEO she is today.
“I don’t think I would have been as effective as a CEO if I did not have an engineering degree,” Fayer told Cure in an exclusive interview. “Engineers problem solve. We get things done.”
Just like in the engineering world, in the boardroom Fayer finds herself in another male-dominated field. She recently led DeepLook through the first close of its Series A round, as well as the second patent for its FDA-cleared technology DL Precise, which allows radiologists to better image dense breast tissue.
She shared advice with Cure for leaders of women’s health companies and female executives who need to raise capital in a culture that can still be unfavorable for women.
Do Your Due Diligence
DeepLook was founded in 2018, but Fayer didn’t join the company until 2022, when the founders recruited her at a conference. She said that for executives who aren’t founders of companies, it’s important to do your due diligence before joining a startup.
“You have to understand the business direction,” Fayer said. “You have to understand what the founder’s direction is, and what you think the direction is, and how to merge those two, because oftentimes they're not the same.”
Understand the Challenges of Women’s Health
Fayer said that it’s important to understand the particular challenges of your field — and that is especially true for women’s health, which has a challenging landscape and is subject to different regulations compared to other industries.
For example, she said, advertising regulations often flag advertisements for women’s health companies as inappropriate, which “stunts market growth.”
And compared to other healthcare startup fields, women’s health companies still struggle with raising capital. While a recent SVB report found that there was a 55 percent growth in VC investment in women’s health in 2024, that still only amounted to $2.6 billion in investment dollars. For comparison, digital health companies raked in more than $10 billion in investments in that same time period, while biopharma companies garnered $26 billion in investments.
“People are starting to get interested,” Fayer said, “But they’re getting interested at the 3 percent and 4 percent level, not at the 50 percent level. So it’s still very hard to get investment.”
Look for Nontraditional Investors
Fayer has pitched the company to traditional women’s health investors, and DeepLook Medical was recently named a finalist in the Impact Challenge at Cure’s Power of X Summit. There, Fayer gave a presentation to potential investors about the company’s technology that enhances the ability of mammography to diagnose tumors more accurately in women with dense breasts, reducing the need for additional screenings.
She doesn’t limit investment opportunities to those that are focused on women’s health, however.
Fayer recently led the company through the first close of a Series A funding round led by Xcellerant Ventures. She said that when looking for investors for the Series A round, she took a broad view of the type of investors that might be interested in the company. Xcellerant Ventures, for example, focuses on health tech and MedTech companies.
“I call ourselves a women's health company because that is predominantly our first focus,” Fayer said, “but we are also a software tech company, and I'm going after investors that are not just women's health but are imaging focused, tech focused, oncology focused and radiology focused.”
The field of investors who focus on women’s health exclusively is too small, she said. If women’s health companies focus exclusively on women’s health investors, “nobody’s going to get funded.”
Make Your Business Case
Fayer isn’t just a CEO — she’s also an investor herself, and has first-hand knowledge about what investors are looking for. She said that tugging on investors’ heartstrings can be useful, but that shouldn’t be the main focus of your pitch. Instead, make sure that you’ve nailed down the business case for your company, including the return on investment that investors can expect.
“Be direct,” she said. “Investors want solutions, and they want to know how they're going to make their money.”