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I'm the Founder and CEO of Jude, a women's strength company redefining pelvic and bladder…
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Peony Li shared thisMeet Dr. Zena Wehbe, Jude’s in-house scientist. Zena is a multi-disciplinary scientist working across molecular pharmacology, clinical nutrition, and health big data. She is the top 1% most-read scientist across all Frontiers Journals. And yet, like many people in this field, her story is often not heard. Before coming across Jude, Zena had been reserved about sharing her work on the bladder with friends. Then she came across Jude through Dragon's Den. The story of how I dream of making an impact on women's lives is what connected with her because she believes her scientific work matters. She reached out on LinkedIn. We started working together on a short consultancy. That turned into something longer-term. Today, she leads our scientific work at Jude. From exploring novel molecular targets for the bladder, to developing formulations, to building university partnerships and contributing to clinical conversations. It’s a reminder of something simple: When you speak clearly about what you're building and why it matters, the right people often recognise themselves in it. So, so glad our paths crossed, Zena. 🧡
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Peony Li shared thisI walked away from a job most people would kill for. Twice. At a start-up venture, I was the youngest manager promoted to Head of Investments. I had a dynamic team, lots of trust and autonomy, and good pay. I left. At a women's health company, everything felt right directionally. I left after one year. I thought I'd stay three or four years. For a long time, I felt like I'd failed. There's a theory that your career is made up of ladders and walls. The wall is your direction. The ladders are how you get there. → Right ladder, wrong wall? Comfort trap. You're going up, but towards somewhere that doesn’t fit your big picture. → Wrong ladder, right wall? The direction is right. The role might not be. → Right ladder, right wall? You're compounding. In both roles, I was either climbing the right ladder towards the wrong wall, or heading to the right wall on wrong ladder. Both times, I left, and that took courage. And both times, it cost me confidence. But those were the biggest growth periods of my career. They stopped me from climbing and made me assess what else was out there. These ladders and walls brought me to Jude. 5 years in, more years to navigate. One thing I'd tell anyone feeling stuck in their career: Maybe you need a different wall. Maybe a different ladder. It's trial and error. But the moments where you feel lost? Those aren't wasted time. They’re periods of growth.
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Peony Li shared thisTwo weeks ago, England launched a renewed Women's Health Strategy. Here’s a 1-minute opinion round up from clinicians, patients, founders, and operators: 1️⃣ Recognition is finally happening, but trust is low. 8.5 Wembley Stadiums' worth of women are on gynaecology waiting lists. Endometriosis takes close to a decade to diagnose. Naming medical misogyny is necessary. But for women who've spent years being dismissed, acknowledgement alone doesn't rebuild trust. 2️⃣ The ambition sounds right. There are meaningful signals in the strategy including: → A shift toward prevention and whole-life care → Early investment into education and FemTech → New standards for pain relief (especially for procedures like IUD fittings) → Redesign of care pathways across menopause, heavy periods and urogynaecology We can all broadly agree these are modern steps forward for women’s health. One that moves past just reproductive health. 3️⃣ But the funding gap is REALLY hard to ignore. This is where the biggest concerns lie. A £1-1.5 million investment in key areas is being compared to larger, more visible commitments elsewhere. Most reactions aren’t arguing against men’s health investment. They’re questioning whether women’s health is being funded proportionately to the scale of the problem. 4️⃣ Implementation is the real test. Delivery is the biggest blocker to good intentions. Everyone from clinicians to founders to patients has the same concern: → Will this reduce waiting times in practice? → Will women actually experience better care? → Will funding reach the communities that need it most? Because without that, this risks becoming another “relaunch of a relaunch.” I think this strategy is well-intentioned. (We are all for it!) But intention isn’t the bar anymore. The bar is thoughtful infrastructure, sufficient funding, tangible next steps, and measurable results. What's your take? And how can Jude help move this forward?
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Peony Li shared thisThis month in women's health. 3 wins. 3 concerns: 💚 The wins: 1️⃣ Hormone therapy makes a $6.3 billion comeback. The FDA removed its black-box safety warning on HRT, in place since 2003. Estradiol prescriptions surged 32% in a single year. Outdated research had been keeping 50 million-plus women from life-changing treatments. 2️⃣ The World Health Organization is developing its first ever guideline on endometriosis. Endometriosis affects 190 million women worldwide. Diagnosis delays average 7 to 10 years. There is still no global standard of care. The WHO has now issued a call for experts to develop one. Late. But necessary. 3️⃣ A new NHS England pathway aims to speed up endometriosis diagnosis. Launched in Cheshire and Merseyside, bringing together primary care, secondary care and public health to recognise the condition earlier and cut waiting times. ❤️ The concerns: 1️⃣ Women from ethnic minority backgrounds wait 11 years for an endometriosis diagnosis. That is 20 months longer than the figure from a previous report whose respondents were 93% white. Disbelieved. Dismissed. Delayed. Repeatedly. 2️⃣ Estrogen patch shortages could last up to three years. Patch use has jumped 184% since 2023. Women are pharmacy-hopping, reducing dosages and switching brands just to keep their supply going. 3️⃣ Women are living longer than ever. But not better. Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men. Their pain is more likely to be dismissed, their symptoms misread, their conditions diagnosed too late. The medical system was not designed with women in mind. The data proves it. Good news exists. So does the gap. Both deserve our attention. Share this with a woman who needs to see it.
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Peony Li shared this6 years ago, I started Jude. Today, we are a team of 24. 7 hiring lessons I learned the hard way: 1. Systems have a breaking point. The processes that got us to 17 stopped working beyond it. We stayed there too long. 2. Comfort in hiring is a bias. I kept hiring people I felt comfortable with. Usually someone who looked or thought like me. Knowing your anchor profile, the non-negotiables you're actually hiring for, is how you move beyond that. 3. Your problems are someone else's opportunity. Turn your challenges into a compelling role. The right person won't be scared off. They'll see exactly what they came to solve. 4. Prepare properly. Before each round of interviews, I prepare and write quite detailed notes about what I want to assess (and each candidate differs), what I want to say, how I sell, and what I need to be honest about. 5. Letting go too late is its own mistake. Most founders let go of their team members too late. If you know it in your gut, you need to act quickly. 6. Short-term performance is not cultural fit. I prioritised performance over fit. The boost was real. So was the disruption. With the benefit of hindsight, fit is always going to be better than a short-term performance boost. 7. The hardest pitch is still to the people you want to hire. Pitching to investors is different to pitching to people who will work with you. You're selling the opportunity, the reality on the ground, and yourself, all at once. I'm still learning. But if these save someone the hard way, worth sharing. P.S. The 7, 17, 70 podcast by Piper is worth a listen. It made me feel less alone in all of this.
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Peony Li shared thisTRUTH: Women are not small men. So why are we still measuring women's strength with men's scales? For decades, strength has meant one thing: how much weight you can lift, how explosively, how fast. By that definition, men come out on top. On average, they have more upper-body muscle mass and can generate higher peak force for short, heavy lifts. But that's only one kind of strength. And it's a remarkably recent one. For most of human history, strength wasn't measured in a gym. It was measured in a day's work. Hunter-gatherer studies show women covered 6–9 miles daily, often while carrying loads of food, water, firewood, or children. In traditional societies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, women carry up to 20% of their body weight on their heads for long distances, a feat of sustained muscular endurance that would challenge most trained athletes. Even today, look at what women's bodies do as a matter of daily life: the supermarket run carrying bags across both arms. Standing for hours: at work, in the kitchen, at school gates. Lifting, bending, holding, repeating. The physical labour of caregiving is almost entirely invisible, and almost entirely female. Here's what the science says about why women were built for exactly this: 1. Women's muscles fatigue more slowly. We can sustain contractions or repetitive movements for longer, even at matched strength levels. In one experiment, women held muscle contractions far longer than men, sometimes by an hour, even when men were stronger. 2. Women also have a higher proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibres, the ones designed for endurance, control, and sustained effort. These fibres are more metabolically efficient, better at managing blood sugar, and more resistant to fatigue. Our muscles were never built for quick bursts alone. They were designed to last. To carry. To hold. To repeat the same movement for hours without stopping. Women’s bodies are intelligently designed to do what we are great at doing. We've spent decades measuring women's fitness against a male standard, peak force, explosive power, maximal load. But change the ruler, measure endurance, load-bearing over time, sustained output, recovery, and the picture looks entirely different. Women have always been strong. We've just been measured wrong. It's time we changed the scale.
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Peony Li shared this2020: Founded Jude. 2026: Team of 24. 300,000 women supported. Close to 1 million supplements sold. Here's how I built a brand in a category nobody wanted to talk about and made it impossible to ignore: 1. Use your voice and uplift others. I came to the UK alone at 15, barely speaking English. That experience taught me what it feels like to be unseen. It's why I've always championed the communities that haven't been heard enough. 2. Get people talking. Before we launched, we built a community. Women activists, local charities, councils. A free bladder-care handbook. We understood that British people use humour to navigate embarrassing topics, so we leaned in. Our newsletter was called The Leaky Times. 3. Make the product impossible to dismiss. Our formulation satisfied Harvard professors. It was backed by Britain's chief medical officer and one of the top urogyanes in the country. If the category was going to be taken seriously, the science had to be bulletproof. 4. Hire diverse voices. Early on we hired community managers who were recent graduates. There was a disconnect when they were speaking to older women. Now we deliberately hire across ages and experiences. 5. Don't let anyone stereotype you. Only 2.3% of VC funding goes to women. When I'm in a fundraising room, I strip out the conversation about gender and age entirely. I focus on one thing: why I'm the only person who can build this company. 6. Take your duty of care seriously. Commercial growth means nothing if your people don't feel cared for. Being empathetic to your team is just as important as hitting your numbers. Bladder health wasn't a conversation. We made it one.
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Peony Li shared thisIn women's health, we rarely get the full picture. D-mannose is the latest example. In April 2024, Oxford published the first placebo-controlled RCT on D-mannose for recurrent UTIs. 598 women. 99 GP practices. Six months. Result: D-Mannose doesn’t work for UTIs. The press is ready to jump onto this headline. And a competitor brand cannot wait for another minute to discredit D-Mannose. But there is an important catch: 1. 64% of participants were postmenopausal, with an average age of 59. → The root cause for UTIs could be very different for post-menopausal women to pre-menopausal women. D-mannose only has a plausible mechanism against bacterial adhesion. If we agree there is not a one-size-fits–all solution, we should also agree a blanket conclusion shouldn’t be drawn. My honest take on this: Evidence is supposed to protect women. Not protect us away from solutions. What we do know: recurrent UTIs affect 1 in 3 women by the age of 24. They are debilitating, isolating, and chronically underfunded as a research priority. Women deserve more than a headline. They deserve trials designed around their biology, their age group. Evidence should be the torch that lights the path to better solutions, not the door that closes off the ones women are already finding helpful. That's the standard we're holding ourselves to at Jude. And it's the standard this entire category needs to rise to.
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Peony Li shared thisMeta will run ads about erectile dysfunction, clinically unapproved sexual performance products, and content telling men to "choose your flavour for sex." But a TikTok explaining the menstrual cycle gets flagged. A birth photographer's image gets removed. A diagram of female anatomy gets taken down, even when the caption is entirely clinical. This isn't just a content policy. It's a double standard baked into the training data. The core problem is that social media algorithms have been trained to equate female anatomy with adult content. So "menstrual cycle," "vulva," "ovulation" trip the same filters as content that is genuinely sexual. Meanwhile, male health content, especially anything framed around sex and performance, sails through. Thanks to Clio Wood and Anna O'Sullivan at CensHERship, in partnership with The Case for Her, for their vital research in the Censorship Revealed white paper!
Peony Li commented on a post
5h
Congratulations! So excited for you. And would love to have the opportunity to work together again.
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Peony Li reacted on thisI was watching that episode and froze- you know when you feel you met someone that is so familiar to you, or when you recognize that person is going to be a big character in your next chapter. Peony Li 🌷 A testament to the great leadership and vision of Peony, who brings out the best in her whole team 🌷🌷
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Peony Li liked thisPeony Li liked thisImpact is moving from a niche to a core discipline in venture, and Eka Ventures is building firmly in that direction. That’s why we recognised Eka Ventures as Impact Leader of the Year at the EUVC Summit & Awards Show in London, together with Isomer Capital, with Camilla Dolan, General Partner, accepting the award on behalf of the firm. This award, sponsored by Better Society Capital and ZEREN, recognises exceptional positive impact alongside outstanding financial performance, based on the principle that impact intention, measurement, and reporting must be integrated throughout the investment process. This recognition comes following the close of Eka’s $107 million second fund, now the UK’s largest early-stage impact VC, where health, wellbeing, and sustainability are considered defining opportunities for the next decade and key drivers of long-term value. Congratulations to Camilla and the entire Eka Ventures team.
Experience & Education
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Jude
View Peony’s full experience
See their title, tenure and more.
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Honors & Awards
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Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award
Duke of Edinburgh
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Full Scholarship
St. Paul's Convent School
Languages
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Cantonese
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Spanish
Limited working proficiency
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English
Full professional proficiency
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Mandarin
Native or bilingual proficiency
Organizations
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Diaspora Emerging Leadership Programme
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- Present- Participated in the Diaspora Emerging Leaders Programme, led and personally mentored by Lord Wei of Shoreditch, an active social entrepreneur who has founded Teach First and is the youngest member of the House of Lords and is the only active ethnic Chinese member of it - Raised the profile of the Chinese diaspora group in the UK; improved Sino-British relations by founding social venture which provides an online and mobile platform matching volunteers to charity organisation -…
- Participated in the Diaspora Emerging Leaders Programme, led and personally mentored by Lord Wei of Shoreditch, an active social entrepreneur who has founded Teach First and is the youngest member of the House of Lords and is the only active ethnic Chinese member of it - Raised the profile of the Chinese diaspora group in the UK; improved Sino-British relations by founding social venture which provides an online and mobile platform matching volunteers to charity organisation - Helped with recruitment of next cohort and leading a team of 5 on revamping marketing materials and the launch of marketing campaign for recruitment
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Aircraft Building Society
Founding committee
--Inaugurated and constructed the first ever hand-built real aircraft RV-8 in China -Liaised with Cathay Pacific, 30 pilots, aircraft engineers, students from SPCS and several newspaper agency to initiate the project “Rosie Moody” costing around HKD 5 millions -Actively participated in the construction of the aircraft for 3 years, prepared for the launch of the aircraft in 2014
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Cambridge University Chinese Society
Vice President
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Cambridge University Finance and Investment Society
Events Director
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Harry Novic
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BECOME A BETTER, SMARTER YOU.<br><br>AI Advisor, Founder and CEO of Rocky.AI - The AI-powered personal development platform.<br><br>Being a former Sales Director, Developer and Product Manager and having trained hundreds of employees in the Automation High Tech Sector, I share with my team the vision to bring AI empowerment for businesses and people who are committed to success and growth.<br><br>I am looking forward to connecting with you to learn more about your projects and to help whenever possible.
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