Alice Pelton is the founder and CEO of The Lowdown, a UK based women’s health platform that started as the world’s first review site for contraception. She bootstrapped and built the platform in 2019 after dealing with side effects from the pill throughout her twenties. Since then, it has grown into one of the more substantive data collections on women’s reproductive health in Europe.
Pelton studied Anthropology at the London School of Economics, then spent seven years working in strategy and product management at News UK, one of the UK’s largest media publishers. That background in product, data, and operations gave her a practical foundation for building a consumer health platform rather than just a content site.
From Side Hustle to Startup:
She came up with the idea for The Lowdown while on sabbatical in 2017, frustrated by her own experience trying to find useful information about contraceptive side effects. She noticed that women reviewed hotels, restaurants, and tradespeople in detail, but there was no structured place to review contraception and document real experiences with side effects.
Pelton bootstrapped and built the site as a side hustle, launching it in 2019. She quit her job at News UK at the end of that year after The Lowdown went viral. That organic growth, with no marketing spend, validated the demand for what she was building.
Building the Data Layer:
The core of what Alice Pelton built at The Lowdown is a structured dataset on women’s lived experiences with contraception and reproductive health. By the time of the 2022 seed raise, the platform had collected over 5,000 reviews and 250,000 data points across more than 85 methods and brands. That kind of dataset doesn’t exist anywhere else at this scale, and it’s what separates The Lowdown from general health forums or social media discussions.
Research conducted through the platform found that 87% of women report a time where they didn’t feel listened to by healthcare professionals, and 68% had been impacted by side effects from their most recent contraceptive method. These figures came from over 2,000 survey responses submitted as part of the UK Government’s call for evidence into women’s health. That positions The Lowdown not just as a consumer product but as a contributor to health policy conversations.
The Platform’s Scope:
What Pelton has built extends well beyond contraception reviews. The Lowdown now covers contraception, women’s health conditions, fertility, and menopause, with the goal of being a resource women can return to throughout their life. The platform includes a contraception recommendation tool, a missed pill calculator, comparison tools, an online prescriptions service, and access to medical appointments.
A medical director reviews all brands on the site to ensure the underlying research is credible, which matters in a space where a lot of health content online lacks any clinical oversight. For founders and operators building in FemTech or HealthTech, that editorial layer is worth noting as a model for trustworthy consumer health platforms.
Funding and Team:
The Lowdown raised $2.5M in seed funding in 2022, led by Speedinvest, with participation from Nina Capital, Calm/Storm VC, Entrepreneur First, and Atomico Angels. That followed an $800K pre-seed round in 2021. Pelton has noted that the company has now closed three rounds of institutional capital.
The team rebuilt the full product and tech stack in 2021 to prepare for scale, led by CTO Marija Ziterbart, who joined after applying via Work in Startups. The team has grown to include full time and part time staff covering product, medical, content, and marketing functions.
Why This Work Matters:
Pelton has pointed out that women were only included in medical trials in the 1990s, and that even now, a significant amount of clinical guidance isn’t designed with women specifically in mind. The data The Lowdown collects on lived experience is meant to help push for further research by surfacing patterns that formal clinical studies haven’t yet addressed.
Alice Pelton runs a Substack newsletter focused on her experience as a founder and new mother, which gives her additional reach with a community interested in both the startup side and the personal health side of what she covers. Founders building in HealthTech or consumer wellness can also find her work referenced across media including Wired, Forbes, the BBC, and The Times, reflecting the credibility the platform has built since 2019.
For anyone working in FemTech or following the women’s health space in Europe, Alice Pelton and The Lowdown are a clear example of what it looks like to build something with real community depth and a defensible data advantage.
