Another in a series of speakers appearing at Sensors Converge 2023, June 20-22, in Santa Clara, California.
Q: As an engineer, what persuaded you to co-found Lioness?
Lee: The sex toy space is male dominated and has been since its inception. While I was a mechanical engineer at Amazon, I had met with a male CEO of a now dissolved sex toy company and out of curiosity I asked him how he knew he engineered a good product. He told me the industry standard for sex toy testing was to put the vibrator on your nose to simulate how it would feel on a clitoris. I couldn’t believe it! This is when I realized the extreme lack of research and data around female sexual health.I left Amazon when I realized I could use my engineering skills to help change the way we understood sexual pleasure through biofeedback orgasm data and research. Together with my co-founder, Liz Klinger, we decided to start our mission by building the Lioness Vibrator, a smart vibrator that gives people orgasm data via biofeedback sensors to help them understand their bodies through science.
Q: What’s been the experience so far? What are the chief remaining tech challenges?
Lee: Being a part of the sex-tech industry comes with a ton of memorable moments. I remember the faces of the people at the testing lab when I first explained that we needed our vibrators tested at their facility for FCC certification! The current biggest tech challenge is based on the fact that the term "sex-tech" was propagated as a term and as an industry just as recently as 2010. This means that sex-tech as an industry is still very young and ripe for tech advancements. We need more tech enthusiasts, engineers, and inventors to innovate in this space to continue pushing the boundaries.
Q: As the panel title asks, what indeed is the key to FemTech success?
Lee: The main key to Femtech's success is to get global recognition that this is not a niche space when it affects 51% of the world and that it will not succeed with just more women in the space. We need to recognize that we will only see the success of Femtech with the buy-in and contribution from everyone. I encourage everyone, not just women to show up to talks surrounding femtech, women in leadership, etc. This can’t just rely on women supporting women.
Q: You may have had a chance to get a bigger-picture view of the situation for women in engineering roles now that you are at Lioness. Do you see the pathway for women engineers to be a little less fraught with problems than a few years ago?
Lee: A goal of mine and one I think a lot of other investors should take into consideration is to build companies that women in engineering want to work at. And I don't mean the products the company builds, but in how the company presents themselves by their leadership team, values in diversity and inclusion, and mentorship programs. And from the entrepreneur perspective, investors as well need to put their money where their mouth is and invest in women to help close the gender gap with women in engineering.
Q: What does Lioness actually do with sensors to integrate biofeedback?
Lee: Lioness has force sensors on the shaft of the vibrator to measure involuntary pelvic floor muscle contractions, one of the best indicators for arousal and orgasms. Paired with an intuitive mobile app, users are able to see how their pleasure can change with different factors like time, caffeine, medication, and stress.
We often like to say that orgasms are a canary in a coalmine for health conditions. In fact, there are billions of dollars that have gone into the research and understanding male sexual function over the decades and how those datapoints could indicate health conditions like cardiovascular disease and overall wellbeing. However, there is a lack of research and data around female sexual function- leaving us with a lot of unanswered questions about our own bodies that not even doctors can help us answer.
We track important aspects of our health and lives through things like nutrition, sleep, fitness, and heartrate trackers because we know that data over our lifespan can help give better self-understanding and confidence to improve our overall health. In this way, it’s about giving physiological sexual function data that people have previously never had access to help understand their bodies in a data-driven way.
Q: How has Lioness performed with sales and investors? How big is your team?
Lee: We raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed a few years ago to be able to bring the Lioness to mass production. Since then with our sales, we now have the world's largest dataset of female physiological sexual function at over 150,000 datasets. And, we have 8 employees! Small, but mighty!
Q: Is your pricing affordable enough in your opinion to make it accessible to a broader audience?
Lee: Yes! Our pricing is $229. The Lioness Smart Vibrator isn't the most expensive device on the adult toy market, but it is the only one that provides deeper insights about your own pleasure through biofeedback data. As a women-founded and women-engineered product, we've done extensive R&D with academic researchers and doctors to create truly the best-of-its-kind in this space. The Lioness Vibrator has the ability to be updated through firmware, just like an iPhone, which means people aren't buying just a sex toy; they're making an investment in their sexual health and wellness and benefiting from our constant updates and improvements as a result.
Anna Lee is co-founder and head of engineering at Lioness, a women-led sexual wellness company. She previously worked as a mechanical engineer at Amazon Lab 126. She appears on the WISE Panel: “Designing for women’s health: the key to femtech success” at Sensors Converge 2023 at 11:40 a.m. PT June 21. The entire event runs June 20-22 in Santa Clara, California, and registration is online.