Key Takeaways:Sextech’s most culturally necessary innovation is happening beyond the Western world, but it’s chronically underfinanced compared to other categories.The pleasure gap isn’t a product problem. It’s an educational, institutional, and infrastructure problem. Beauty has the retail reach to legitimize sexual wellness as healthcare. The question is whether it will.
Sexual wellness may be having its mainstream moment, but its subcategory, sexual technology, is still surrounded by stigma.
The market for sexual technology (or “sextech”) is projected to more than double in the next five years, growing from $48 billion in 2025 to $110 billion by 2030, per Mordor Intelligence. But take a closer look, and you’ll find a category fragmented by geography, censorship, and definition.
According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s (IHME)’s 2023 Global Burden of Disease Study, over 40% of women and nearly 30% of men globally experience some form of sexual dysfunction, underscoring the unmet need for comprehensive sexual wellness.
But sexual dysfunction isn’t the only reason for seeking sexual solutions: The LGBTQ+ cohort is the fastest-growing consumer demographic in sexual wellness, growing at a 9.51% CAGR through 2031, with the sapphic segment at the forefront. The mainstreaming of sexual health as self-care is also coming into play. Gen Z is redefining sexual wellness, viewing it as essential to overall health and mental well-being, prioritizing it far more than previous generations, according to McKinsey.
In July 2025, Harry Styles’ Pleasing Yourself double-sided vibrator and silicone lubricant, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), was conceived with sexologist Zoë Ligon, sold out in minutes, and its viral reception prompted an urgent restock in early 2026 to meet high demand. At the same time, Singapore-based company Lovense released Emily, an AI-powered companion doll, during CES 2026—the first from a sextech company—demonstrating a possible path for the category’s next decade.
“The impact of technology in relationships and daily existence cannot be overstated,” Luka Matutinovic, Chief Marketing Officer at luxury pleasure brand Lelo, told BeautyMatter. “We find ourselves in an era where technology intertwines with every facet of our lives, and understanding its impact on intimacy and sexual wellness is crucial.”
Sexual wellness is piquing the interest of investors, startups, and wellness and beauty brands alike. However, the market remains culturally uneven, chronically underfunded outside the West, and definitively complex.
Mapping the Global Market
The definitional messiness of “sextech” and “sexual wellness” as business categories often sees the terms used interchangeably; however, market valuations range wildly from $819 million to $43 billion in 2025, while predictions vary from $4,743.7 million to $250 billion by 2035, depending on whether you include things like VR porn and sex robots, or simply wellness products.
Mordor cites sextech as the fastest-growing vertical (increasing at a CAGR of 18% from 2025-2030) in the wider sexual wellness market, due to technology-driven innovation in intimacy: from app-connected devices to AI-enabled toys to VR experiences. (The sex toy segment made up 45% of the market share in 2025.) The sexual wellness market was separately estimated at $43 billion in 2025 and is projected to surpass $62 billion by 2030.
While North America dominated with 35% of the global market in 2025, Asia-Pacific (APAC) is the fastest-growing region, with a CAGR of 8.79% (from 2025 to 2034), due to its large consumer base. Additionally, urbanization and rising disposable incomes are elevating purchasing power, while growing awareness and acceptance of new products further drive market demand.
Sachee Malhotra, founder and CEO of That Sassy Thing, India’s first female-founded sexual wellness brand, states that roughly 80%-90% of its customers are buying their very first sex toy. “The category is still overwhelmingly first-time buyers. That means the real opportunity isn’t in fighting over the same consumer in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. It’s in reaching women who haven’t yet been reached, in Tier 2 and Tier 3 India, and speaking to them in the language they understand,” she told BeautyMatter.
In Europe, Germany is emerging as a key region for prevention-focused sexual solutions in the market, valued at $6.61 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $7.12 billion in 2026. The continent as a whole is seeing growth in the sector due to the fact that Europeans have seen considerable increases in STI case numbers.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, shifting societal attitudes towards sexual wellness and an increase in sexual health awareness are driving demand for self-care products, with the market expected to grow from a revenue of $181.7 million in 2023 to $297.1 million in 2030. Saudi Arabia alone is projected to reach $307.3 million by 2034, demonstrating its key-player status in a region previously overlooked.
Around the world, sexual health and wellness products demonstrate a clear opportunity for brands. But when it comes to financing capital or product innovation, a different picture emerges.
The Innovation and Investment Map
From Mauj, the first sexual wellness brand for Arab women, created to destigmatize female sexuality in the region, to newly launched Vira, which brings Ayurvedic sensuality to the US market, the most interesting entrants are rooting intimacy in cultural heritage rather than universalizing Western aesthetics.
“Ayurveda doesn’t separate sexual wellness from overall well-being,” Shruti Viradia, Vira’s founder, told BeautyMatter. “It treats pleasure, vitality, and emotional connection as essential to health.”
For a US audience, “ancient sensual practice” isn’t about rigid ritual or spiritual prescription, Viradia continued. “It’s about reintroducing slowness, embodiment, and connection into experiences that have become overly clinical or commodified. Vira makes that accessible through texture, scent, and formulation without necessarily requiring any prior knowledge of Ayurveda.” With interest in holistic options driving a global Ayurvedic sexual wellness market towards an estimated $2.9 billion by the end of 2034, natural and herbal-based sexual wellness solutions like Vira are positioned for future-proof success.
Mauj, on the other hand, built its sexual wellness brand to destigmatize sexual and menstrual health through its product line and education in the region. Its success is the emerging Middle Eastern market’s proof point: at the end of 2023, just three years after its launch, the brand secured $500,000 in investment to continue developing products that facilitate body exploration. Similarly, Motherbeing—the Egyptian femtech online destination that started as an Arabic-only sex education platform before expanding into more areas of women’s health with Daleela, its AI-powered health assistant—secured a $200,000 investment in 2025.
“Now, building for Indian women means designing around a reality where discretion is not a preference. It’s a survival strategy,” Malhotra said. Founded in 2021, That Sassy Thing raised roughly $720,000 in a 2025 seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures, having seen 200% year-over-year growth and over 50,000 customers served across India, according to the startup. That Sassy Thing’s strategy is working: its vibrators don’t look like phalluses, nor does the packaging say “vibrator” anywhere. “When a product doesn’t mimic genitals, it quietly removes a layer of shame,” she added. “Discreet Shipping is the second most viewed page on our website, right after the product pages. That single statistic tells you everything.”
While Eastern brands across the international landscape focus on cultural discretion, localized heritage, and first-time buyer needs, their Western counterparts have been mainstreaming through beauty retail, celebrity crossover moments, and luxury design normalization.
Lelo was founded in Sweden in 2003 and was the first brand to reframe sex toys as premium objects. “There were no premium or luxury pleasure objects at all on the market, and we wanted to use our design and engineering experience to change that. We wanted to offer something better and saw it as an opportunity to make a difference, blending beautiful form with pleasurable function,” Matutinovic said.
Fast-forward to today. Lelo’s sleek, sumptuous products, along with distribution in 160 countries, demonstrate what it takes to have longevity in the category. Similarly, Maude utilizes elevated minimalism as well as inclusivity as the mainstream entry point. Founded by Éva Goicochea in 2018, the Brooklyn-based brand (with Dakota Johnson joining as an investor and Co-Creative Director in 2020) has raised over $10 million since it launched.
Following a similar trajectory, Dame was founded in 2014 by a Columbia-University–educated sex therapist, Alexandra Fine, and MIT-trained engineer Janet Lieberman, before building a strong foundation through a total investment of $13 million, with 109% year-over-year e-commerce growth and messaging that sexual pleasure is a critical part of overall well-being. This growth paved the way for strategic acquisitions—Emojibator in February 2024 and Chakrubs, a crystal sex toy brand, in March 2025, which cemented its place as a market leader—alongside its Planned Parenthood partnership.
While Western brands like Dame and Maude have collectively raised tens of millions across multiple institutional rounds, their counterparts in the Middle East and South Asia are operating on rounds rarely exceeding a million dollars. The funding infrastructure, like the market itself, remains heavily skewed toward the West, and until that changes, the most culturally necessary innovation will arguably continue to be underfinanced.
But even as these brands scale globally, they confront persistent structural barriers that the category has yet to close.