Dare Bioscience

Dare Bioscience

Dare Bioscience was founded in 2015 by a team including current CEO Sabrina Martucci Johnson, who previously served as CFO of WomanCare Global and held leadership roles at a venture-backed women's health startup. The company structured itself as a publicly traded clinical-stage biotech — Nasdaq: DARE — rather than a traditional family office or asset manager, raising capital through repeated equity offerings and non-dilutive grant funding. Its foundational premise was that women's health represented a vast, underinvested therapeutic frontier abandoned by major pharmaceutical companies after patent cliffs on legacy hormone therapies dried up. The firm acquired or in-licensed a pipeline of product candidates addressing conditions that lacked any FDA-approved treatment options, including female sexual arousal disorder and vaginismus. The firm's strategy centers on advancing clinical-stage candidates through Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials, funded primarily by grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a royalty monetization agreement with Bayer AG signed in January 2020. That agreement gave Dare an upfront payment and committed milestone payments in exchange for a royalty stream on future sales. The pipeline includes XACIATO, a clindamycin phosphate vaginal gel that won FDA approval in December 2021 for bacterial vaginosis and was subsequently licensed to Organon for commercialization. Other candidates include Sildenafil Cream for female sexual arousal disorder, which completed a Phase 2b trial, and DARE-BV1, a thermosetting hydrogel for bacterial vaginosis. The geographic footprint is US-focused, with regulatory submissions made exclusively to the FDA and no ex-US clinical sites. As of the most recent filings, Dare Bioscience employed fewer than 25 people, operating out of a single San Diego office and relying heavily on contract research organizations for trial execution. The firm has not disclosed total assets under management in any traditional sense — it is not a fund — but cumulative capital raised through public offerings and grant awards is estimated at under $100 million. No adjacent family office, foundation, or membership-based co-investment club is known to exist. May 2025: The company reported positive topline data from its Phase 2b RESPOND study of Sildenafil Cream, meeting both primary and secondary endpoints and representing the most advanced clinical program in that indication globally. Dare Bioscience occupies an unusual structural niche: a publicly traded biotech with no revenue, a single-digit employee count, and a pipeline concentrated entirely in women's health indications that lack any FDA-approved drug. This makes it more akin to a special-purpose clinical development vehicle than a diversified asset manager. Its reliance on non-dilutive grant funding and a single large pharma licensing deal reflects a capital model designed to minimize shareholder dilution while advancing low-cost, repurposed-molecule programs — a structure few other biotechs have replicated at this scale.