Designing Desire: What Sex Tech Tells Us About Who Gets to Innovate

A conversation with Polly Rodriguez, co-founder of Unbound Babes, about pleasure, power, censorship, and the future of an industry that shouldn’t be controversial but very much is.

When I was first introduced to Unbound Babes, it took me about five minutes to fall in love with the brand. Not because of any single product, but because of what the brand stands for. Unbound doesn’t just sell sex toys. It challenges who gets to design them, who gets to talk about them, and who gets to feel like they matter in the conversation about pleasure.

That’s why I invited co-founder Polly Rodriguez (@pollyrodriguez) on my TEQ podcast. And our conversation went exactly where I hoped it would, into the messy, political, deeply human intersection of technology, design, activism, and bodies.

A Category That Is Political Whether It Wants to Be or Not

Polly didn’t set out to build a politically driven brand. But the industry made the choice for her. From the moment she started Unbound, the barriers were systemic: advertising platforms that wouldn’t take her money, pitch competitions that disqualified her category, and investors who called sexual wellness for women “too high risk.”

The irony is staggering. We’re talking about a global sexual wellness market valued at roughly $27 billion in 2025, projected to reach over $50 billion by 2034, growing at around 8% annually. The sex toys segment alone represents about 45% of that market and women make up the the vast majorly of buyers. These aren’t niche numbers. This is a massive consumer category that the financial and advertising establishment continues to treat like a fringe concern.

The CES Moment That Captured Everything Wrong

If you were in tech in early 2019, you probably remember what happened at CES. Lora DiCarlo, a startup founded by an almost entirely female team, won a CES Innovation Award in the Robotics and Drones category for the Osé, a hands-free device designed for women’s pleasure. Then the Consumer Technology Association stripped the award and banned the company from exhibiting, citing a clause about products deemed “immoral” or “obscene.”

The same show floor that had featured a male sex robot the year prior. The same event that regularly hosted VR pornography companies.

It took four months of public pressure before CTA reversed course and reinstated the award, along with a formal apology. The episode became a watershed moment for the industry, and a crystallization of everything Polly has been fighting against.

Designed by Users, Not Assumptions

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was Polly’s description of what the sex toy industry looked like when she entered it around 2014. The products overwhelmingly reflected a male perspective, in shape, in packaging, in the hyper-sexualized imagery of women used to market them. Products were designed by people who weren’t using them.

This is a pattern I see across tech, and one I frequently raise with my clients: you cannot design well for a demographic you don’t include in your decision-making. Whether it is accessibility, age diversity, or gender representation, the absence of those voices in the room always shows up in the product.

Polly’s team approached design with an entirely different philosophy. Around 70% of women need clitoral stimulation to orgasm, a fact that has nothing to do with the phallic shapes that dominated the market. Unbound incorporated haptics, wearable tech, and human-centered UX into products that prioritize function, approachability, and inclusivity.

Take the Flick, a cocktail ring vibrator I was wearing during the podcast, it was designed for the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, inspired by the cocktail ring’s original purpose of fostering conversation among women. It works as a standalone piece of jewelry. Nobody needs to know what it is unless you choose to tell them. The sizing kit comes in the box with extra screws because fingers fluctuate in size. These are the kind of thoughtful, body-aware design choices that only happen when your end user is driving the process.

Or look at the Puff, a suction vibrator that uses color breaks to indicate where to hold it. Minimalist UX on what could be an intimidating product. A dedicated off button on the Squish because, as Polly confirmed, the anxiety around turning products off is one of the most common reactions she sees in person. These aren’t marginal details, they’re the difference between a product someone will use once and one that becomes part of their life.

The Funding Gap Is Real, and Compounding

Polly’s experience with investors isn’t just a sex tech problem. It’s the tip of a much larger iceberg.

In 2024, companies founded solely by women received just 1% of total US venture capital, down from 2% the previous year, according to PitchBook. Even when you include mixed-gender founding teams, female-involved startups captured roughly 20% of total funding despite representing 25% of all deals. The average deal size for women-only founded companies was $5.2 million, compared to $11.7 million for their men counterparts.

And here’s what makes the gap truly irrational: female-founded startups generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested, compared to 31 cents for male-founded ones, according to Boston Consulting Group research. The data consistently shows that investing in women isn’t a charity case, it’s the smarter bet.

The sex tech funding environment compounds these challenges. When your category is classified as “high risk” by default, when platforms won’t let you advertise, when investors preemptively opt out, you’re fighting two funding gaps simultaneously: gender and category. And the censorship extends beyond the brands themselves, it reaches anyone who tries to amplify the conversation. When I ran an SEO campaign on Google to promote this very podcast episode with Polly, it was rejected. First on political grounds. Then, after I appealed, it was rejected again for non-family-friendly content. A conversation between two women about design, innovation, and wellness, flagged twice. That’s the chilling effect in action: it doesn’t just silence the brands, it discourages anyone in their orbit from giving them visibility.

Polly mentioned that Unbound has a less than 2% return rate on products, against an e-commerce industry average of around 30%. The product-market fit is undeniable. The obstacle isn’t whether these products work. It’s whether the power structures will let them exist in plain sight.

The AI Question That Keeps Me Up at Night

We ended our conversation where I keep ending up these days: AI and its implications, in this case the impact on intimacy.

Polly’s perspective is clear-eyed and deeply concerned. She told me that the app-enabled vibrator trend never made sense to her, the last thing most people want mid-experience is to reach for their phone. AI takes that problem and amplifies it.

Recent data validates the concern. A 2025 Common Sense Media study found that 72% of US teens have used AI companions at least once, with over half using them regularly. About a third use them for social interaction and relationships, including companionship, emotional support, and romantic interactions. A separate CDT survey found that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers has had or knows someone who has had a romantic relationship with AI.

Polly’s worry isn’t theoretical, it’s that AI companions are algorithms designed to keep users engaged, not to challenge them or help them grow. A real partner has their own feelings, boundaries, and needs. An AI will mirror back exactly what you want to hear. For young people building their first understanding of intimacy, that’s a profoundly distorted foundation.

And the representation problem compounds everything. As I pointed out to Polly, AI models aren’t trained on diverse datasets. What happens when a non-binary teenager asks an AI about their sexuality and the underlying training data reflects only binary frameworks? What happens when government policy actively pushes AI toward narrower definitions of gender and sex? The same biases that shaped search algorithms and social media advertising policies are being baked into the systems that young people increasingly turn to for the conversations they’re afraid to have with humans.

The Permission Problem

When I asked Polly what she wished more investors, technologists, and policymakers understood about sexual wellness, she credited her friend and renowned entrepreneur-activist Cindy Gallop with the best framing: people are just looking for permission. They’re looking for one person to say this isn’t weird.

Unbound’s less than 2% return rate tells the story. The products work. People love them. The barrier is social, not functional. If a few more retailers follow Ulta’s lead, if a few more investors look at the actual performance data instead of the category label, if a few more platforms treat women’s health products with the same neutrality they afford Theragun ads, the market opens dramatically.

The broader sexual wellness market has been growing at around 8% annually despite every structural headwind imaginable: advertising bans, banking discrimination, funding gaps, retail exclusion. Imagine what that growth looks like when even half of those barriers come down.

What This Really Teaches Us About Tech

Sex tech is a mirror. It reflects every bias, every double standard, every structural inequality that exists in the broader technology ecosystem, just in sharper relief.

The same industry that celebrated a male sex robot on the CES floor banned a female-focused robotics innovation. The same VC ecosystem that claims to be meritocratic allocates 1% of capital to all-female founding teams. The same advertising platforms that run Viagra ads censor menopause content.

If you want to understand who technology is really built for, look at where the censorship happens. Look at who gets funded. Look at whose bodies are considered political just for existing.

Polly Rodriguez and the Unbound team aren’t just building better sex toys. They’re exposing the fault lines in an innovation system that still, in 2026, struggles to center half the population. And that’s a conversation that belongs in every tech conversation, not just this one.