With $27 Million, Maven Continues To Expand Women’s Health Offerings
Today, Maven announces a historic Series B financing announcement led by Sequoia and Oak HC/FT with participation from Female Founders Fund, Spring Mountain Group, and 14W. Maven launched in 2014 as a tele-medicine platform for women’s health with both a consumer and enterprise offering. Along with the Series B financing, Maven is announcing the launch of a breastmilk service, Maven Milk, which it says is its next step toward closing the resource and care gap for working mothers.
Female Founders Fund founding partner Anu Duggal recently interviewed Founder & CEO Kate Ryder about her inspiration for starting Maven, the challenges she’s experienced along the way, and her vision for the future.
Kate and I first met for tea at Soho House in the summer of 2014. She was in the process of moving from London to New York and pitched me on Maven — a digital health solution for women. In those days, innovation in healthcare was hard to imagine with the existing behemoths as well as tight regulation leading to a very regulated environment, with the exception of massively funded companies like Oscar.
Kate’s vision for Maven was the first glimpse into what it could mean to have healthcare re-imagined from a female perspective. I was blown away by her insight, both as someone from outside of the industry, but also as a consumer. In many ways we were on parallel paths, proving to the market that investing in women makes strong financial sense. Over the years, Maven has grown into the strongest brand in women’s health leveraging both a powerful consumer brand that speaks to women, as well as a incredibly strong enterprise opportunity with potential for a massive business.
Read the Q&A below.
1. What is the story behind your inspiration in starting Maven?
When I hit 30, health really started to matter. A lot of my friends started having kids, and for a vast majority, there were a lot of issues we had never thought about before — infertility, miscarriage, postpartum depression. It was clear that there wasn’t as much support as there could be around this period in life, with major gaps in women’s healthcare and overall support for working mothers. So we set out to change that by offering every type of healthcare provider a woman would ever see in her 20s, 30s, and 40s — from OB-GYNs to nutritionists, mental health specialists to lactation consultants — and give her the ability to access them at any time, all in one place. This kind of on-demand accessibility empowers women and families to be their own advocates, instead of be at the mercy of a dysfunctional healthcare system.
2. Your career most recently prior to Maven was in venture capital and journalism. How were you able to translate this into your work as a founder/CEO of Maven?
I began my career as a journalist, first at The New Yorker and then at The Economist. To get your stories published, you have to be self-starting, persistent, and put structure to chaos, and those qualities definitely translated to entrepreneurship. There are also a lot of similarities between finding and crafting untold stories in journalism and finding large opportunities in business and crafting a product to fill those needs for customers.
3. Explain how Maven works. What types of issues do women use Maven for?
Maven’s family benefits platform covers everything that someone goes through when they’re starting a family all the way through returning to work after having a child. Employers buy this for their employees, and everything from on-demand doctors’ appointments to concierge support around navigating insurance, adoption agencies, or coordinating in-person care is completely covered. Additionally, we just launched a breastmilk shipping service as the latest feature on our platform so women who are traveling for work can seamlessly send their milk back home to their baby.
We also have a marketplace where anyone can book a one-off appointment with our providers, get prescriptions delivered to their doorstep, and pay out of pocket. That’s been quite popular for women living in rural areas of the United States, and of course millennials who love the convenience of on-demand care from anywhere.
4. There was no “women’s health” category until recently. How did this impact your growth with the business? What are the biggest changes you’ve seen as the market has heated up with more players in the space?
We couldn’t have started at a better time. Though it was harder to raise funding in the early days when women’s health wasn’t a “category,” being one of the only companies in the space also gave us the opportunity to really focus on co-developing solutions with our early customers and building a foundation to serve the market at scale. It’s great that there are new entrants in the market getting funded — competition makes everyone better and women’s health needs more innovation — but for us, we’re fortunate that we’re quite a few years ahead from a customer, regulatory and analytics perspective.
5. There are many regulatory issues in setting up a healthcare business. How have you been able to address these?
Great lawyers! In all seriousness, it took some states awhile to adopt favorable telemedicine policies. Most notably, Texas only allowed patient-provider relationships to originate virtually via telemedicine on December 17, 2017. Fortunately, Maven has not been a part of these legal battles, but we’ve benefited greatly from all the work done before us.
6. As a female founder building a women’s healthcare business, what has the fundraising process been like for you?
When I raised our first small round in 2014, Obama was in office, healthcare reform was progressing, and digital health funding was setting records. But even still, many investors I met couldn’t see the opportunity for women’s health. Some of our biggest early champions were our female investors — we actually have quite a lot female angel investors (and some amazing men who understood the need and saw the opportunity as well!). Now, the market has totally turned. There are a lot of women’s health companies that have launched in the last few years, and I get a lot of emails from funds I spoke to years ago who are now telling me they now have a thesis on women’s health. That’s when you know people are taking the needs of this market and the size of opportunity seriously. Since launching Maven in 2015, we’ve delivered care to more than 150,000 patients, have clients ranging in size from 200 to 200,000+ employees, and have a network of 1,200+ highly-vetted practitioners. We’ve grown 14x over the last 12 months, and have raised more than $40m in funding to date.
7. Healthcare as an industry offers massive opportunity. Where will you focus over the next few years?
We’ll be using this funding to expand Maven’s Family Benefits platform, which offers modern support for fertility, maternity, early parenthood, and the critical but often overlooked return-to-work period. We’ve also expanded our return-to-work care with a new breast milk domestic shipping and international travel service: Maven Milk. Maven Milk will provide more working mothers and parents with the support they need to return to work with confidence and will be offered through our corporate family benefits platform.
With this fundraise we’ll support more women in the workforce, more women in leadership positions, more diverse families, and give more parents the confidence to balance the demands of family and career. This is the beginning of long-overdue improvements to a broken system, and society at large.
8. What advice do you have for female founders looking to innovate in healthcare?
It’s all about perseverance and persistence. When I left journalism to find a bridge to entrepreneurship, I probably had 110 failed meetings. It was awful! Just knowing that persistence is the most important thing. And optimism. They go hand in hand. Healthcare is such a complex and bureaucratic industry that you have to remember those things.
9. What is your vision for Maven five years from now?
For Maven, success in 5 years means enabling women everywhere to get the information they need, affordably, to help them make good healthcare decisions for themselves and for their families.
From an employer perspective, I think we’re at an inflection point where the majority of self-insured employers are thoughtfully grappling with different approaches toward fertility, maternity, and return-to-work care — both from a cost perspective and from an employee diversity, satisfaction and retention perspective. Over the past five years, benefits programs at the vanguard have been making some really aggressive moves on fertility and maternity, but I think the next five years will see this go much more mainstream as we get beyond early-adopters and average companies start to see the negative competitive impact decades-old maternity policies are having on their business.
Secondly, from a consumer standpoint, while digital medicine is rapidly becoming mainstream among certain parts of the U.S. population, it still isn’t for the vast majority of Americans. This is changing and will continue to change, particularly as employers and insurers more proactively force it to change, given the impact ER visits, for instance, have on their bottom-line. I think that evolution is necessary and foundational to our goals.
