Sex sells…everything except itself. Whilst venture capital floods into crypto and AI fantasies, the sextech industry worth billions in potential faces systematic exclusion from banks, payment processors, and investors. Cindy Gallop, the advertising legend turned sextech revolutionary, has spent 12 years building what others refuse to fund: platforms that teach authentic intimacy in a world shaped by pornography.
Sex is ubiquitous, until it isn’t.
It moves perfume, headlines, and hamburgers. It flows through advertising, culture, and commerce with remarkable fluidity, provided it remains aestheticised—glossy enough to entice, sufficiently detached to disarm. But construct a business around authentic sexuality, real sex, human intimacy, grounded in mutual pleasure, and the machinery of institutional support evaporates. Payment processors demur. Platforms censor. Investors vanish into the ether.
This is the fundamental contradiction haunting sextech: a category with demonstrable demand and cultural urgency, yet virtually no institutional legitimacy. Ironically the discomfort isn’t with its explicitness, it’s with sincerity. This resistance only intensifies when the venture is female-led, challenging not only prudishness but power structures themselves.
Few understand this paradox more intimately than Cindy Gallop, the 65-year-old legendary advertising executive who spent decades as Chairman of BBH New York before becoming one of the industry’s most provocative voices. Known for her unapologetic approach to disrupting entrenched systems, Gallop describes herself as “the Michael Bay of business” with her infamous tagline “I like to blow shit up,” making her equal parts a viral sensation and cultural lightning rod.
Over the past two years, Gallop and I have spoken numerous times, exploring the systemic blind spots plaguing the advertising industry, the futility of attempting to reform patriarchal systems from within, and touched on why dismantling rape culture remains the through-line of her work. In our latest conversation for Beyond the Boardroom, we returned to the topics that have defined Gallop’s post-advertising career since launching MakeLoveNotPorn over a decade ago, this time through a lens sharpened by battle-tested wisdom to answer a profoundly existential question: why, after 12 years, a proven concept, a global audience, and undeniable cultural relevance, will no one fund sextech?
Coined in the early 2010s, the notion of sexual technology refers to any tech designed to innovate, enhance, or destigmatise sexual health, wellness, or pleasure. Initially dominated by hardware in the form of vibrators, toys, fertility trackers and the like, the space has since expanded to education platforms, virtual intimacy tools, AI-driven companionship, and consent-based content ecosystems. That evolution is what led Cindy Gallop in the 2010s to define, pioneer, and champion her own category—”sextech”—pushing it beyond commerce and into cultural reform. While its earliest adopters were often underground entrepreneurs or bold femtech founders, the term gained mainstream traction thanks to trailblazers like Gallop herself, and others such as Bryony Cole, who spotlighted the category with her Future of Sex podcast and now runs her Sextech School, currently in its 17th cohort. Today, sextech is a multi-billion-dollar industry in potential, but one still treated as fringe—both overhyped and underfunded, its innovations often either reduced to novelty or punished for their honesty.
Interestingly, after years navigating the throes of Madison Avenue, Gallop never set out to become a sextech revolutionary. “Complete and total accident,” she laughs. At a time when society expects women to gracefully recede from sexual visibility as they age, Gallop was doing precisely the opposite, dating younger men and refusing to conform to cultural constraints on desire and maturity. In the course of that experience, she began noticing a profound disconnect between expectations around intimacy and the reality of authentic connection: there was virtually no acknowledgement about what men and women actually desire from sexual connection. That chasm, she realised, was the inevitable result of a culture that refuses honest discourse about sexuality. So, she created MakeLoveNotPorn.com as a series of public service announcements contrasting pornographic fantasy with real-world intimacy, and presented it at TED.
The world responded with unprecedented vulnerability. “Thousands of people from across the globe—young and old, men and women, straight and gay—poured their hearts out, confessing things about their sexual lives they’d never told anyone,” she recalls. The volume and raw honesty of those messages revealed something far more significant than content creation. “I realised I’d uncovered a massive global social issue. I felt a personal responsibility, because I’d already created something people found enormously helpful.”
Welcome to the sextech wasteland
From this very foundation, MakeLoveNotPorn has today evolved into a user-generated video platform celebrating what Gallop terms “real-world sex”: consensual, communicative, often tender encounters between performers, because they are simply sharing the sex they have in the real world.
Every video undergoes human curation. Every contributor receives verification. It represents a model predicated on agency, transparency, and trust, values that should but infuriatingly do not, distinguish it from pornography in the eyes of business infrastructure.
Yet this careful distinction remains insufficient to penetrate the ingrained systems that govern digital commerce be it payment processors, hosting platforms, and advertising networks that operate on binary classifications. “Every single piece of business infrastructure that any other tech startup takes for granted, we cannot access,” Gallop shares with frustration. “Because the fine print invariably states: no adult content.” And the proof is in the testing ground. This year alone witnessed MakeLoveNotPorn being debanked three times within two months. Stripe and PayPal have categorically refused partnerships. Hosting platforms have imposed bans. Meta has taken down the MakeLoveNotPorn Instagram account, flagging it for inappropriate and explicit content and other video infrastructure remains perpetually fragile.
Whilst other startups focus on growth and optimisation, Gallop’s team navigates an endless labyrinth of workarounds and negotiations. “Other startups get to scale,” she observes. “We get to endure this relentless obstacle course.”
Even direct corporate outreach yields unpredictable results. Sometimes executives embrace her mission; sometimes they recoil. Each new service demands bespoke solutions, protracted negotiations, or elaborate circumventions of the circumventions. “It’s extraordinarily labour-intensive,” she notes, “and other founders simply don’t face these barriers.”
The challenges extend far beyond operational hurdles. Capital raising has proved equally treacherous, with years of pitching revealing the impossibility of predicting investor receptivity.
“You cannot discern from external appearances what anyone truly thinks about sexuality,” Gallop denotes. “Investor willingness to fund MakeLoveNotPorn is entirely a function of someone’s personal sexual journey.” She shares that most liberal-appearing investors often prove surprisingly conservative when confronted with actual sexual content, whilst those who seem traditional sometimes embrace the mission enthusiastically. This unpredictability underscores why spreading her message becomes paramount, it’s not an arena where one can easily approach potential partners cold. Instead, it becomes crucial for people to first understand the mission and feel genuinely aligned before any meaningful conversation can begin.
Occasionally, seemingly aligned individuals withdraw unexpectedly. Others who might prove supportive remain unaware that this category exists or merits investment. The barrier transcends institutional policy, it’s fundamentally psychological. When investors do venture into this space, they quickly encounter the relentless gauntlet of technical challenges, legal constraints, fine print exclusions, lack of tech support, and advertising restrictions that define the sextech landscape. The accumulated friction—debanking, platform censorship, payment processor rejections—eventually spooks even the most mission-aligned well-wishers, forcing them into an uncomfortable choice between believing in the vision and actually enacting it. Gallop recalls an angel investor, an early premium sex toy brand, who declared after experiencing these systemic obstacles firsthand: “I’m never investing in sextech again.”
When the system fails, build a better one
This systematic exclusion from conventional business infrastructure has fundamentally shaped Gallop’s strategic approach. Rather than awaiting inclusion, she’s constructing comprehensive alternatives. Her roadmap encompasses BlockFree, a payment processor for restricted categories; MakeLoveNotPorn Academy, an educational platform; an advertising network serving censored industries; and additional tools designed to support legal, ethical, transparent sextech enterprises.
“Every single business obstacle I encounter represents a disruptive opportunity in itself,” she explains with characteristic pragmatism.
MakeLoveNotPorn Academy exemplifies this philosophy, aspiring to become what she calls a “Google of comprehensive sex education,” aggregating culturally sensitive resources across all demographics. The platform will maintain human curation for all contributors, addressing the algorithmic bias that plagues existing resources. “Parents and educators consistently tell me they cannot locate appropriate materials because search algorithms are fundamentally biased,” Gallop explains. “Valuable content gets systematically blocked and censored.”
Her long-term vision involves proving these ventures can operate safely and successfully at scale. “When I demonstrate the viability of processing restricted business payments securely, of advertising sex-positive brands safely, established players will acquire these solutions,” she predicts. “Meanwhile, I’m enabling every other sextech founder to build sustainable businesses.”
For Gallop, the root of these systemic barriers transcends conservatism or policy, it’s fundamentally about fear. “The single most paralysing force in business and life is the anxiety about others’ judgements,” she argues. “And this dynamic operates around sexuality unlike any other domain.”
This apprehension compounds exponentially when businesses centre female pleasure and agency. Gallop often contrasts her mission with figures like Bonnie Blue or Andrew Tate, personalities who commodify hypersexuality in ways that prove both profitable and platformable. MakeLoveNotPorn represents the antithesis of this approach.
“We empower women in their sexual agency through a completely different paradigm,” Gallop asserts. “We showcase the kind of intimacy people genuinely desire.” Rather than fantasy, it offers authentic connection, and for many, this proves more radical than explicit content ever could.
This distinction remains central to Gallop’s conviction that MakeLoveNotPorn possesses the power to dismantle rape culture systematically. “We demonstrate how wonderful great, consensual, communicative sex is in the real world,” she explains. “Our videos model positive sexual values and behaviours.” She shares testimonials from users, including one man who credited a video by saying “this makes me want to be a better man—in the bedroom, and in life.”
Gallop is also still actively seeking partnerships with dating apps, a pursuit that reveals deeper questions about consent culture in the digital age. When I ask her how it’s even possible to end rape culture and shift notions around consent when there’s such a pervasive hookup culture today, and how one disrupts systems that profit from superficial connections, her response is unabashedly direct.
“Dating apps often benefit from keeping people single and searching. The longer you’re on the app, the more money they make. They have no incentive to help you find a meaningful connection.” She argues that platforms built around genuine intimacy threaten this business model. “We show people what real connection looks like, what good sex actually entails.”
Her vision extends beyond partnerships to fundamental platform redesign. “Imagine dating apps that actually educated users about consent, that promoted communication skills alongside attraction matching,” she suggests. “But that requires acknowledging that sex exists, that people want good sex, that these conversations matter.” Still building what others won’t. Still arguing for love as infrastructure. “We give people permission to be all about love,” she says. “And it’s what people really want.”
Into the cultural minefield
Advocating for love as infrastructure also becomes exponentially more complex when extending beyond Western cultural contexts. When I ask her about targeting countries where rape culture and the business of sex feel impossibly out of reach, her response reveals both pragmatism and determination, informed by her Malaysian-Chinese and English heritage.
“Take India,” she says, citing it as both the most challenging and most necessary market. “We’ve received countless messages from young people there expressing: ‘Oh my god, India desperately needs this.'”
The demand is undeniable, but Gallop aptly notes the execution requires delicate navigation of cultural and political sensitivities.
For example, she maintains a comprehensive strategy for launching MakeLoveNotPorn in India, but has struggled to identify local investors and partners. In one telling instance, after being invited to speak at a prestigious conference, organisers requested she avoid using the term “rape culture” in her presentation due to political sensitivities. “That’s precisely the problem,” she responds. “That pervasive fear of naming the issue prevents us from addressing it.”
Her approach requires finding influential local advocates who understand both the urgency and the obstacles. “We need people embedded in these societies who can translate our mission culturally, not just linguistically,” she explains. “Someone who understands how to frame sexual education and consent in ways that resonate locally whilst maintaining our core message.”
Despite such setbacks, Gallop expresses increasing optimism about Asia as both a cultural frontier and an investment landscape. “I’m witnessing Asian women determined to disrupt entrenched systems,” she observes, citing the FemTech Association Asia and the growing number of women leading enterprises in sexual wellness, education, and menopause care.
“I know there are exceptionally wealthy women throughout Singapore, Malaysia, and India who would absolutely want to fund our mission,” she asserts. “They simply haven’t realised this opportunity exists yet.”
It’s evident that Gallop believes the opportunity for sextech has never been more significant. “The more regressive our culture becomes, the more people recognise the necessity of our work,” she observes. Parents have begun purchasing MakeLoveNotPorn subscriptions for their teenage children. “Over the past year, the messages have become exponentially more numerous and increasingly desperate,” she reports. “A mother recently wrote: ‘I just discovered my twelve-year-old son is watching Pornhub. I would much rather he watched MakeLoveNotPorn.'”
What she wants in return is simple: to be funded and supported at the level male founders routinely are. “I don’t consider myself anywhere near as influential as I want to be,” she says. “Because if I were, our industry would be supporting me.”
Still, she presses on, because the barriers persist, but so does the demand. “The more backwards we go, the more the world is crying out for what we do.”