This Week in Startups - Fixing a broken system - Mahmee CEO Melissa Hanna on patient-centric maternal care | E1464

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Molly Wood sits down with Melissa Hanna, CEO and Co-Founder of Mahmee, a care network for parents (01:44), they discuss the impetus for Melissa launching the company (12:34), the challenges of bringing the product to market (22:08), how she built the network and more (37:29)! (00:00) Molly tees up today’s episode (01:44) Molly Wood sits down with Melissa Hanna, CEO and CoFounder of Mahmee, a care network for parents (11:19) Thorne - Personalized, scientific wellness. Go to https://Thorne.com/u/TWIST (12:34) Melissa on how the pandemic helped expose the need for a care service like Mahmee (20:54) Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist (22:08) The bittersweetness of it taking so long for this product to happen (36:12) Reforge - Apply for their next cohort at https://reforge.com/twist (37:29) How Mahmee built its network Check out Mahmee: https://www.mahmee.com FOLLOW Melissa: https://twitter.com/melissachanna FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, welcome back to this weekend startups. It is Thursday. We're doing back-to-back badass women interviews, basically. We have an amazing interview today with Mommy, CEO, and co-founder Melissa Hannah. She was on back in January 2020 right before the pandemic, which changed everything for this business, which is focused on maternal health care and outcomes. Today, she joined to talk about the $9.2 million series A that she just announced. It is an incredible, incredible interview on a really, really important topic. You're going to love it. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by Thorne. Thorn empowers people to take control of their long-term well-being with a proactive science-based approach to health. Through a variety of

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And, reforge. Reforge is a career development platform for top-tier professionals in growth, product, marketing, and engineering. Their summer cohort starts July 18th, so apply for membership today at Reforge.com slash Twist. Melissa, Hannah, is CEO and co-founder of Mommy, which she started all the way back in 2014. Melissa, thanks so much for coming back on Twist. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be back.

And we're actually having you at a congratulatory. moment, which we're going to talk more about, but congratulations on your recent raise. Tell us the details. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, it's quite a thrill. We closed our Series A, led by Goldman Sachs, asset management team with participation from some of the bigger names on our app table, including Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and use capital, backstage capital.

these are all long-time investors from the early days of the company. So it's really great to see folks double down on their commitment to the company and to the work we're doing. And, yeah, it's $9.2 million series A long time coming for the company, very much about the past commercialization for an enterprise health care company. That's just, that's been the story of the business, just building that out and making the business case for Mommy. will remind us before we dive more into that commercialization plan that is now enabled by this new funding, remind people who don't know what Mommy does. Mommy is an integrated benefits platform for maternal and infant health. We are building the digital infrastructure needed to connect patients and providers together across this highly fragmented market that is maternity care and infant care. And we really focus on delivering outcomes-based programs. through prenatal and postpartum care, basically from the time you find out you're pregnant, all the way through baby's first birthday.

And we do that through selling those programs to health care enterprises. So that means insurance companies, health systems, big hospitals, all of those kinds of organizations can contract with Mommy to distribute access to our comprehensive maternal health care programs. Got it. So mothers are not paying you directly. It's a B2B. Yeah, it's a B2B to C business.

There are some things that moms can pay for directly in the platform, but that's really not the core aspect of the experience. We want to make sure that this is actually highly accessible and available across the, across the market, which means actually selling to a lot of publicly funded health plans as well. We do a lot of work in Medicaid. Oh, great. Yeah.

So there's not that concern. certain that this is like any kind of private health care that, you know, if you're a mother in need, I know that your goal is addressing disparities in maternal care. And this is not a situation where you would have to, you know, you'd go pay for a private clinic. Right. We are a really a solution for for all families and designed to close gaps in care and create health equity, as you said, eliminating those health care disparities that exist in the market today. Tell me about, you mentioned this And it's a big question that I have. You've been operating since 2014, and just now did your Series A.

Were you just so lean and profitable this whole time? We've been extremely lean. Yes. We've, this market, I think, has been undervalued and underappreciated by investors for a long time. So, you know, we had to sort of fight a lot of misconception around the, the, the opportunities within maternal and health care for the first few years of the company's founding. And as part of that, it also meant just like figuring out how to keep doors open while we were trying to make the case in the venture world. So yeah, you know, we made money from day one and

have always really just like optimized for a very efficient business that is continually selling something that people will value and pay for. And now things have sort of converged where the investment world has started to see the potential in what we're doing as well. What do you think caused that shift and then

sort of made you go like, all right, this is the time to raise more money? Well, I'm always raising. So I don't think there was a number or not we should go raise. There's always the pursuit of capital.

you know, in the larger pursuit of growth. But there's, the pandemic certainly has been an accelerant for digital health generally. We've seen some massive rounds come together in the past 24 months. And so we were following those trends. And there was a lot of enthusiasm from our current investors to get back out there and reintroduce the company to the market as a, you know, as a venture-backable business, there are probably a few different factors at place. I think one of them would be sort of the macro trends around digital health as an area for

investment. And it's, you know, definitely picked up across the board for companies. The second is that maternal and child health in particular has, you know, has been on the national stage for a long time as a topic of conversation from it, from a health equity standpoint, but it's now starting to become part of the healthcare economics conversation as well. It's imperative that there be ultimately like downward pressure on the vertical for incumbents and enterprise organizations to adopt innovation, right?

Like if they don't see a problem and they think what they're doing is fine and moms and babies are happy and healthy and everything's working, then those organizations are not going to seek out, innovative solutions and partnerships with startups like ours. And so what happened during the pandemic is it created a lot of downward pressure on the kinds of organizations that companies like ours sell to and work with. And so then soon after lockdowns began, there was just a mad rush to start to look into what technology companies could do to resolve some of the issues that were arising. when hospitals and clinics didn't want patients that were not sick coming in, then, you know,

for a lot of folks, okay, that's fine. I'm not planning to go in anyway. So sure, I'll stay home. I don't need to go maybe for my annual checkup this year. I feel fine. But what if you're pregnant and you're a low or moderate risk pregnant person? You still need to go in for checkups. But now the question became, well, could we do a virtual check-in? You know, could we do a virtual appointment with that person instead of having them come in for a visit at the hospital or at the doctor's office. And so those kinds of questions really started to bubble up for a lot of the folks that we wanted to do business with. And so when we pitched them before the pandemic and said, we've got really great solutions to introduce technology into your maternity care experience,

they said, oh, we're fine, we're fine. You know, everything's working, just fine. Pandemic hits. And everyone's like, okay, wait, you said you have technology? What? We need that? Pretty bad. Yeah. And so that was absolutely a factor. And I mean, I got an email in my inbox the day after the lockdowns began in Los Angeles. And it was from an organization that I had pitched repeatedly in the previous two years. And they had continually been like, yeah, we're just not ready. We don't need it right now.

It's going to take a long time to implement. We're not ready. The subject line was just Capital Ledger's urgent. Can we talk today? Wow. Happy to get on the phone with you. What can we do? What can we do for you?

You're like, I'll be as gracious as humanly possible right now. Wow. And you had already built it. I mean, this is a solution that had already somewhat presciently included things like remote care. I mean, it really was about modernizing the whole experience. Like, did you have to build in any features sort of in response to these pandemic needs? We did. We had a lot of the infrastructure in place to begin with.

But as is preferred, you're building a lot of. along with your customers. You're learning about their needs and you are rapidly designing solutions for them. And so it got really exciting as soon as these bigger players, we're talking about some of the largest public health departments in the country coming to us and saying, hey, we have a substantial Medicaid population that's on county or state funding for health care. And we need to provide these services to them and we don't have infrastructure to do that right now. can we use mommy to offer these virtual appointments? Can we use mommy to offer classes and support groups to check in on pregnant or recently delivered patients that have been discharged from the

hospital that we really don't want them coming back in and we don't want to readmission. If we can help it, we need that bed for a COVID patient, for example, but we need to stay up to date and in touch with what's going on with our maternity population. So we were right there ready to go with those core solutions that they needed. But then, of course, once we got really entrenched in some of these enterprise relationships with health systems and with insurance companies, we started to see there's even more that they need that we can build out for them. And that journey is actually what led to the series A. If you're a high performing founder or operator or human, you need to make sure you take care

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Again, this is personalized health and wellness and Thorne is totally vertically integrated, so you're not dealing with anyone in the middle. It's a one-stop shop to feel better. To get started and take 10% off your first order, head to thorn.com slash you. That's the letter you slash twist. That's thorn.com slash you slash twist today to save 10%. Interesting. The journey of realizing, okay, we've got to build this feature and ship this and add all of these extra things and we're going to need a bunch of engineers and all of a sudden this need is totally pressing. Yeah. Wow. One of the biggest findings and it's not something that was particularly surprised to us. It was more just that it became clearly, it sort of like came to focus as the commercialization, like the opportunity to commercialize what we were doing and sort of shrink rapid.

for Enterprise, came through some of these very large healthcare organizations that initially had thought of us as a pure tech play that was just the software that they needed to operate their own labor and delivery departments, maternity, or sort of prenatal care departments and postpartum programs. And as the pandemic were on, we started to see nursing shortages. We started to see a lot of turnover in public health departments. people were just getting burnt out. They left their post as, you know, would be a leader or an administrator of a maternal health care program.

And all of a sudden, there's just this shrinkage of the industry. And our customers were coming to us and saying, do you have the people? Like, we need staff. We don't just need technology now. We need people who can actually deliver care. We were at the ready with a national network of professionals who can do this work in our community base. They're not working in the building, per se, in the doctor's office, in the hospital,

they're working in the community. They're doing home visiting, for example. They're running community programs. And so we've got these people. What can we do to really bring things together for you? And there was just a litany of concerns and challenges that our customers had. You know, what we really need are nurses. We really need someone who's got that clinical eye who can kind of listen to the patient's needs,

maybe do a video call, maybe do a message, sort of message back and forth, understand what's going on during the pregnancy. or after the baby's born and then figure out how to address that and whether or not we need to get a doctor involved. So that's nurse triage. Yeah. Classic set of sort of activities that a nurse would do, you know, at the doctor's office, at the hospital, but now they needed it done virtually.

And we were just like, yes, we have those people. We could do that. Wow. And that became the core offering. And we call that Mommy Gold. It is our program for ongoing support and advocacy by nurses and care coordinators. So it's just a subscription that enterprises can basically access and share with their patients and say, hey, we're signing you up for this program.

You have all of this support, seven-day-a-week care coordination and remote monitoring by nurses. And for the patient, it feels like it's a gift. It's been offered by the healthcare organization. You know, it's been made available to them. But Mommy is actually stewarding and managing the entire program. That is remarkable. And I have a million questions about the McKenna. of that. But I'm just so struck by, you know, there's this idea that success is when preparation

and timing collide. And I mean, I wonder what you think your business would look like today had it not been for the pandemic. Like obviously, you had built a really strong business. There was plenty of need for it. Our, you know, maternal mortality rates alone, you know, let alone the cost of giving birth in the United States would have suggested that that everybody needed mommy. and then here this pandemic came and it was like, things can change so much faster than all these organizations thought they could. Yes. I think that the pandemic has altered all of our lives in ways that are not entirely measurable. Like, it's difficult to fathom the impact that the isolation and the uncertainty and the fear,

and really all of the big emotions that we've all experienced during this time, how those things have shifted the course of our lives and then add into that, you know, just like a little fly-by-night startup. You know, I mean, it's how it changed the course of things for us. We've always, we've always struggled with funding. We've never struggled with our mission or with our value proposition. We always knew that we were doing things that mattered. And in fact, you know, I recently spoke with like an early stage founder precede,

that was saying that they were struggling with their business because they felt like they were doing too much, which has been my anxiety the whole time. Like, we're doing too much. We have to do it, you know, like do one thing well as they say. Focus, focus, focus, yeah. Right. And that tension of like, okay, well, how do we reconcile that the things we're doing

are working, but maybe it's not framed, it's not structured. it's not clear to the market in a way that can be systematically sold, commercialized, you know, rinse and repeat, that that all makes sense, like, to the market. In-house, like, yeah, we know we do it, Mommy, but we had struggled with matching that reality with what people sort of saw on the outside. A lot of people told me, like, I don't really know what you guys do. I don't really get it. And some people say, hey, you're probably doing too much.

Yeah. What I would say that the pandemic did for this business is that it really, it's shown a very bright light on the work, the impact of what we've done, like the outcomes that we actually have. It made it easy to sort of bring into clarity what the value proposition was in a way that the external sort of the outside world could understand. And the way that that happened was entirely driven by the experience that people had of the pandemic. Meaning, let me just, it was a simple thing. We've always known that the work that Mommy has done is something that should be thought of as a benefit in the idea of like a health plan. Like it's having ongoing support during your pregnancy shouldn't be a luxury. It should be something that's included.

It should be something that's part of your health plan. It should be something that's offered by your employer. It's something that's included with your hospital stay. That when they say, hey, you're going home today, they don't just end the story there. They say you're going home and you're getting access to mommy for the next year to be able to really have the support and guidance you need. Now that you're moving into this new chapter with bringing home a baby. Let me tell you, I would have love to have that instead of all the little hats they gave me. cats are cute, but they didn't really help.

You know as much as you can before you leave, right? We're literally saying they're like, they let us leave with this? This is not a good idea. We are not ready for this. That's what we want to solve. It's like there's more that should come with that as you are moving into this next phase. And ideally, if we've been with you during pregnancy, we're just in your corner the whole time.

We're just there for you no matter where you are in that journey. And so we've always thought of this as a benefit. But it wasn't until the pandemic hit that people started asking, wait, what are the benefits that I get with my health plan? Now everyone's using this language around plans and coverage and benefits. The average person may not have even spoken about health care in this way before the pandemic. Certainly a lot of our investors didn't. A lot of the investors I was pitching said, I just don't understand. Why don't we just sell this to parents directly?

It's because there's a bigger play here with insurance, with health systems, with health coverage. And so now on the other side of this pandemic or whatever this stage is that we're, in, all the investors understand that. They get the pitch. The consumers get that this is something that I shouldn't have to pay for. It should be something that's included in my health experience. These were things that were part of my vision from the beginning of the company, but it's really hard to explain to someone else outside who doesn't have that level of understanding of how health care works in the United States, which I think a lot of us got, we got that understanding in the midst of the pandemic. I'm going to quickly explain one question.

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You can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. When you work with inbroker instead of all those slow incumbents, you're not dealing with those giant lumbering large companies. Signup takes days, not weeks. And the process is transparent. There is no opaque price. So to instantly buy custom-built insurance for startups, go to inbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, you're going to get an extra 10% off by using the code Twist. Easy to remember this week in startups, T-W-I-S-T. Go to Inbroker, E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R-com slash twist and use that offer code, T-W-I-S-T. Do you ever feel this is a great outcome for you and for millions of mothers in America?

Do you ever feel a little pissed that it took this 100-year? because the inequities were always there, right? The disparities are terrible. The business was always clearly articulated and strong, and it must be on some level, sometimes late at night, like a little bit infuriating. I know it's your job as a founder to stay positive. I'm just saying I would be pissed.

No, only had podcasts like this. I've been pissed. I have been pissed since I founded this company. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, I founded it. Because I was pissed. I can be both happy and sad.

I can be joyous and also self-righteously angry while building this company. And I try and create space for that for my team as well because this is difficult work. It is not the only space in healthcare or in startup land. or whatever you want to call it, any of these different worlds that we kind of coexist in, it's not the only hard thing. It's only one of the many hard things that people are addressing. This one attracts people to it,

and I speak here for my team, and for the people I've met who work at other companies in maternal child health. It attracts people who are incredibly passionate, compassionate, and downright emotional about this work. And so if I, try and shroud that and just be like happy, yay, yay, you know, we're killing the game all the time. I am doing a disservice to the team in that moment. So yeah, I've been pissed. I mean,

that's what in some cases it's what drives me to build the business the way that I am building it because there have been many off-ramps. Like, there are a lot of other things we could have built and there's a lot of other ways we could have built this. We picked the hardest path. We picked enterprise health care. We picked insurance company sales. We picked hospital and health system sales. We picked building software and services and not just one or the other, you know. Yeah. I mean, to have built a network of actual human beings is really not done these days. So yeah, yeah, that's the answer. Yeah, I'm pissed, but I'm happy as well. And I've had, I've had two years along with all the other digital health founders out there across the country

to reckon with that indignation really. But just that feeling of like, how could I possibly be happy right now? How could I possibly be feeling anything but the despair that so many of us have experienced in living through this pandemic and losing people? in this pandemic. So it is, yeah, it's a weird, weird state of existence. Yeah. I, yes, I was thinking the same.

Like, it's sort of profoundly strange to think that this incredible outcome came in such a terrible way when it should have been so obvious all along. Yeah. Not to, you know, make this therapy interview, but I feel a little emotional talking about it. You know, like we're also talking in the spring of 2022 when women are extraping. extrapist. Yeah. That is, that's the way to say it.

And I had someone recently, I mean, literally, like this is all happening in just the past few weeks between the fundraise announcement, the, yeah, the leaked opinion for Ruby Wade. This, I had someone say, you got to get online and make a statement and, you know, put a tweet out there, you know, like you got to, you know, all the, all the, all the female founders, all the Femtech founders, all the whatever, maternity tech founders, everyone's got to do something. And I stop the person, I say, look, this is fundamental to our business. This isn't just like, oh, let's get on the cultural,

you know, bandwagon here and, like, put up a square of some kind. Like, this affects the way that we operate in delivering care to women across the country. This affects the way that we work with state health departments. It affects the way that we work with Medicaid programs, it affects the way we work with the federal government. We have contracts that vary in sort of the levels of, you know, U.S. like civics and government. Like, we work in the private sector, but we also work in the public sector.

And so things that affect the way that we access care in this country, all types of care, can have a profound effect on the way that the startups in the space deliver. on that promise. We're not the only ones out there saying, hey, we want to increase access to care for people. We're just one of the many startups doing that work. And so, yeah, I think that there are some important conversations that this industry is going to have to have in how we proceed as we witness, you know, like earth-shaking change in this market. Right. You just came out of an earthquake and changed, earth-shaking changed to your business. And now there's another one on the horizon.

If I tell you, we're ready because we could have predicted the last one. You've been through the wars now. It's the whole idea of sort of the like wartime, peacetime, CEO and, you know, how to be about these kinds of things. I thought I had a playbook, you know, I thought I had a way to conceptualize the fight because this is a fight in what we're doing. We are addressing. some egregious stats in this country that have persisted for decades around how women receive maternal health care, the quality of that, whether they live or die in the hands, by the hands of the people that are caring for them. It's been a fight from the beginning. Now it's just like,

okay, you know, double up on the armor because we're not, we're not giving up on our mission. Yeah, I mean, we should note that one of your notable prior investors and hopefully current, it was Serena Williams who herself almost died in childbirth because she could not get doctors to understand what she was telling them about her own body. Yes, and she has shared her story and very boldly and really put, you know, I would say put her own experience out there as a way for people to understand that this could happen to anyone and that this is systemic. It's the way that we treat women.

It's the way that we listen or don't listen to women. And that, and I know she, I mean, really, it's been, it's been awesome to have her as an investor, as someone who has spoken out about this and really used her platform for change as well. Yeah. Tell me about the business. Let's do some nuts and bolts before, before I go all the way down the women's health route because that could be a very long conversation. How does the pricing work and how is it selling into, I mean, this is, of course, a legendarily hard industry to move, even I would

imagine in the face of the kind of really dramatic change that has taken place. How do you make those inroads and create those relationships? That's a great question. I like that question. I like that They call you. Usually, I get the question just like, how do you guys make money? I say, in a lot of different ways. Because that's, that was my guess. Like, that answer clearly is very complicated, but the most important part is, right? People have to, I mean, it's care.

They have to trust you. You must have a massive sort of vetting, you know, due diligence book for them. Yes, we have SOPs on SOPs. We are all about compliance and sort of like systems, systems based, management of what we're doing across the country. So I'll give you the sale. Like, what is the thing that we've actually shrink-wrapped and commercialized for healthcare organizations to get for mommy? So I mentioned it sort of briefly. It's Mommy Gold. It is this ongoing support and advocacy from nurses and care coordinators. And that includes this seven-day week, you know, on-demand really

as support as needed for any little question and thing that comes up. It really is a little bit of is effectively a nurse hotline that's highly specialized in maternal infant health. There's nothing you can ask us that we can't answer or won't answer or say, oh, that's a tough one. If anything, what we're going to do is we're going to give you the information that is within our scope of care, within our scope of practice. I sort of say up to the level of what our team can clinically and legally provide in support and then facilitate more attention and care. being provided to you by your current care team. So it's literally like, okay, that's a good thing to talk about with your doctor.

Do you need help booking your next appointment? We want to make sure you're getting in as soon as possible. Sometimes it's urgent. And it's actually like, okay, drop everything who's taking care of the baby. You need to go into the urgent care unit or you need to go back to E.T. Emergency right now because you may be experiencing an extremely high blood pressure that could be putting you in stroke risk category. There's all sorts of things.

There's a gamut of concerns that come up and we hear everything. We just, you know, we deal with the fun and exciting stuff. We also deal with the scary and terrifying stuff. So that is the core experience of having mommy is that we are in your corner. We're actively listening and we actually know your story because you get a unified health record. You get this interface that is the app for parents to use to sync up the mom and baby's health record together. So you have it all in one place. You have your birth story.

What was the pregnancy like? What was childbirth like? how's the baby doing? How are you doing? Maybe there are losses along the way. There may have been other conditions or maybe other concerns. There may be history of previous pregnancies. And you want to have that all managed together so that if you're going to share your birth story with someone, they kind of have the rest of it, the pieces of the puzzle there. And that prevents a lot of medical error. Because if we think of, you know, patients is sort of like needing advice that's one size fits all, we're going to miss the needs of the patient population. So we want to know,

your birth story, your unified health record story, along with the care that's being provided them. Now, there's also a lot of fun educational things. There's support groups and classes and there's community and there's sort of having that normalization of the experience. Like just being able to hear from other people, like what's going on in their lives. And so we have a lot of support groups that are offered each week

that are just like drop in, hang out sessions, child birth education classes all included. Everything is free for parents to be able to engage with. And then there's sort of the coup dutata, which is the national network of community-based birth professionals, stools, midwives, lactation consultants, nutritionist, therapists, pelvic floor therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, and so on. People that are really just like in your neighborhood, get your community, get your experience, and are going to meet you where you're at.

And so that's the mommy network that we're able to then, through our nurses and care coordinators in-house, route you into care and make sure that you're adding those kinds of folks to bolster up your care team. So it's not just your OB and your pediatrician. It's all of those other people that can be really beneficial across the maternity journey. So that's like what we have packaged together and offer. And it's sold basically on annual contract value. it sold to enterprises for their patient populations. You get that so you can give it out to everyone. And every patient that's sort of part of your population,

your membership, on your plan, whatever that is, can then just activate their account on Mommy. From there, we make it possible for those enterprise organizations to build out new service lines and new kinds of offerings for their membership. So it starts with Mommy Gold. It's kind of the building block. It's just like, let's get your patients access to those nurses, those care coordinators, and referrals to the providers and network. But as we recently launched with Blue Shield, California, they wanted a doula to be

available to every one of their members that was coming sort of into Mommy. They said, we want to build on that, add Mommy Gold plus a doula. And so we're able to then contract with a group of doulas that are vetted, that are really phenomenal in their own work, have wonderful health care outcomes for the mothers that they care for, and really get their community and live in that community and work in that community. And so adding in the doula component was something that was just sort of a, you know, layer number two, building on the core offering for mommy, adding on duas on top of that. And so the same thing as possible. If you say, we want everyone to have a lactation consultant. Let's add that on. We want everyone to have mental health support.

let's add that on. And so it just sort of grows from there. That's the integrated benefit is that you're kind of putting everything for the patient in one place. All right, listen, Reforge is a career development platform for top tier professionals, people who work in growth, product, marketing, and engineering. These are like the four pillars of your company, aren't they, growth product, marketing, engineering? Are you making those four functions and your leaders in those functions as great as they can be? Well, Reforge on boards new members and cohorts, and then they give them year-round access to all the program content, a vetted community of peers, plus weekly releases and events. And here's why members love it. Well, career advancement. You're

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Applications take under three minutes. And if you get in there and you're accepted, you're going to become a super executive. You're going to be a real contributor to your team. Apply at reforge.com slash twist. R-E-F-O-R-E-F-O-R-G-E dot com slash twist. I mean, I'm really mad this didn't exist when I had my son. But also, how do you get,

those, it sounds like sort of a multi-sided marketplace. How do you build that network? And what is the incentive for those doulas and all of those nutritionists and the lactation consultants to be on the platform? Yeah, it is a market network or I guess it would be one way to describe it. It is a multi-sided platform where our core customers are the enterprises that are coming to us and say, can you build out these programs for us? Can we get access to Mommy for our patient population? But in order to make that possible, we have to have a really robust network of providers who are just amazing at what they do. And to do that well, we have to make something that they want and that's something that is valuable to them and then alone. And that's the mommy platform for

community-based health professionals. We actually are a SaaS company at the core. We built software for providers that just works very well and continues to evolve. And we have a team that's dedicated to building out really great software for community-based birth professionals. It allows them to chart and document care. It allows them to send and receive those referrals, collaborate and communicate with other professionals. So maybe the do-l is like, I've got a really great nutritionist. I want you to talk to.

Let's link that person in right now. You can do all of that within the platform, booking and scheduling and all of the kinds of practice management tools that a birth professional would need. That's the SaaS side of the business that makes it possible to actually have such a great network of professionals. And for us to actually know, like to really vet that the folks that are in the Mommy Network are really good. Because we literally can see their work. We can see that they are just so high touch, so supportive, so compassionate toward the patients, so on top of the things that are going on with patient care,

that we can feel really confident then to effectively sell that network to enter. prizes and say, hey, we've got a really great group of people here in this region that can deliver this kind of care to your patients. Right. I sort of feel like I don't understand why this is only a 40, not to get us all pissed again, but I sort of feel like I don't understand why this is only a $45 million valuation because this is a, I think about the, the, the, the Tam here, and it feels very large to me. It, it is. I'm not sure. I swear to God, I'm not. I'm not. instigating here. I just...

I'm afraiding me. No, I'm so sorry. No, no. I look, don't, don't... Oh, sorry. No, I'm here. I'm saying, don't get me started on the

the imbalance, the imbalance in this industry. There are a few very big players that have received outsized sort of amounts of venture capital and valuations in this space and a whole lot of players that are quite small and just getting started,

just building, but very purposefully building their solutions. And there are in the pre-seed and seed phase. There's actually not that much in sort of the early to growth stage, you know, A, B, zone here. And in fact, that made it harder. There were conversations that we had as part of the journey toward a series A that included, should we join forces with a couple of other companies and just make a bigger company because investors were telling all of us founders the same thing,

which is, you know, all the dollars during the pandemic started moving to the polls. It was like all of a sudden there was a proliferation of early stage VC, you know, $2550, $250,000, you know, $1,000 checks going to early, early stage companies. And then investors that were telling me, like, you know, we just don't get involved for less than 40 million.

Like, well, okay. How do I get there? Right, exactly. You're like, if you want to give me 40 million, then that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. That makes sense.

Those investors say included Goldman Sachs. So it's actually an instance of wonder and it's own that they, you know, that they actually actually led this round. You know, people keep asking me like, how did Goldman Sachs get involved? Like, they don't do these kinds of deals. They don't feel like Femtech investors to me. I haven't met a lot of them, but... Well, I found the best ones.

How about that? I found the best ones in the organization. We're working with the folks through the launch with GS initiative for diverse founders with the folks from the growth equity team that have an impact focus, an impact lens on their work. And the initiative that is sort of literally where the dollars came from, the 1 million black women initiative through Google. and sacks. And so there are these sort of intersecting initiatives that sort of were happening within the firm that

it took a while to understand who is who and who is doing what kind of work and then start to build those relationships out. And it's been a long time. Like, you know, this did not happen overnight by any means. I pitched them 10 times. I mean, I got 10 nose before I got the, yeah, we're going to do this. We're going to leave this deal. Wow. And they were, they were hearty nose. Like, Melissa, we already told you, we don't do this.

And you were like, yeah, you do. God. I mean, good for you because. Oh, I fought. I fought for this. And that was because there were enough signals. And we were actually working very closely with them. And we went through the launch with GS program. We got all of this great coaching and one-on-one support from a lot of people across the firm.

Like we worked with people at the healthcare desk. We worked with people in growth equity. We worked with people in the public markets. Like we started to understand how to shape and articulate the business to investors. And so that whole time, I'm like, and you guys are not investing why? And so, you know, I understood that there was a distinction that was just like we don't do early stage deals. Right. But it seemed like there was just a really big gap in the understanding about how to

actually grow this particular market. I mean, I am diplomatically addressing your original question here. The reality is, like, yeah, there just was not enough money coming to this space for a really long time. And there was a little bit of, uh, sorry, a little bit of money. There was a lot of money going to a little bit of companies, like a little group of companies that were, um, rapidly progressing through the letters. And the rest of us sort of that were, you know, being looked at as like, yeah, well, now,

you know, you've got a really big competitor. Like, you know, why should you think? Yeah. You hear all this stuff. Right. You're like, I wouldn't have had that really big competitor if you had, right. I was actually on a walk and talk with a very high ranking executive at Goldman Sachs.

And I was at an event and I ran into the CEO of one of these large companies that had received a lot more funding and, you know, indirect, like in the space, in the realm. And we had like a very service level, like very complex. calm conversation. Oh, hi. Hey, how are you? How are you? But I'm thinking myself, like, yeah, you have $100 million. And I can't seem to, you know, get nine. Yeah. And so we're just like chopping it up. And the person that I'm walking with, we sort of pass and we keep moving and the executive from Goldman Sachs is like, who's that? And I was like, oh, that's just like one of the most well-funded companies in this space, led by a

a female founder. I mean, it's like, that's part of it too. And I realize that. I'm not going to deny that like I just don't look like or present like or act like whatever sort of was the, the archetype founder that people were betting on earlier on in women's held FemTech. And so,

yeah, this executive was like, okay, it seemed like you guys were all chopping it up like, go cool there. But I'm feeling a lot of heat coming off of you right now, Melissa. Yeah. Yeah, this is what I really had.

It was like, you know, the person was trying to make sense of it, not knowing, like, just imagining two, like, slightly competitive CEOs just being like, hi, how's it going? Like, how's your company? It's like mean girls. Right. Yeah, totally. I love that for you. Yeah. Exactly.

And so in them processing this, I sort of saw, like, sort of done on their face. I'm like, oh, my gosh, like, this is the discrepancy. This is the disparity in this market. And they were like, yeah, you seem like low-key, like super angry right now. And I'm like, yes, I am low-key, super angry right now because this is what I'm up against. Y'all are telling me, go out there, make the case for this company, go get the funding, go build the business, go compete. But meanwhile, you have all the money, and I'm working with you. And I can't get any of it because I just haven't raised enough to warrant your funds yet.

Right. You either need to back off. Exactly. And I, and this is really the signal. this was the conversation we had was like, either you guys need to sort of step away and let me figure this out with funds that can help us at this stage or put your money where your mouth is.

And it started a domino effect that I didn't even know after that walk and talk, it was actually, it was a few more months, it was several more months before I found out, like, yeah, we've all been talking internally and we want to do this deal. And it was, it was,

I was like running around the house screaming because I was like, oh my God, this is happening. This is actually happening. Yeah. My goodness. I'm so glad that it did. I really am. This is the part where I think we should note two things. One, you're one of only 93 black women in the country to have raised millions of dollars in funding. I believe there was a magazine cover. Wasn't there? It was like, oh, guess what? All of the black women in America who raised more than a million dollars fit on one magazine cover? Yeah, there fit some publications like this. I don't think I was on that magazine cover, but I'm part of the crew. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And then, and I feel like this is actually the right place to go from here, let's talk about the positive outcomes. Like, Mommy has served over 15,000 pregnant and birthing individuals, perform thousands of physician escalations and life-saving interventions, hypertension, infection, placental bleeding, severe postpartum depression.

Like, not only can you say you close this round at long, freaking last, but this is really, really, really, really helping women. it is it is uh thank you for sharing that because i i do i do want to bring that up that that's that is uh what has made this all worth it this whole thing because we're actually we're doing the damn thing we've been doing it and uh and that's what made it um so uh so heartening to like finally have um this moment happen it's like it's it's been there all along. We've had the stats. They've been building. They've been increasing. We've been serving more families. We've been serving more mothers and babies. And we've been seeing the not just the outcomes go up, but the costs go down. We're doing it in an efficient way.

And this funding is really going to actually allow for us to create even more efficiency for the market on the whole, but also just for ourselves internally. This is about building out even more technology to serve the providers who are serving the patients, right? If we can actually create much more, like, thoughtfully designed solutions for the providers to deliver care, whether they work at mommy in-house, our nursing staff, and our care coordinators, or they're part of that community network, it's all about them being able to get to the patient faster, understand more completely the patient's needs, that whole story from the unified birth record, and then be able to collaborate with each other and not feel isolated and not leave the patient

to feel isolated in the course of care. So the outcomes are really, I mean, our proudest, our proudest point. Like, it's great to do the milestone raise and to talk about it. But, like, we have actually saved lives. We have gotten patients care when there have been moments where one of our staff members, one of our team called the doctor, called the hospital, called the L&D unit and said, hey, I need to bring a patient back in. Like, she's got to be seen today.

here's what's going on. And people have said, I don't know, my schedule's really busy. Or, you know, don't send her back in here, send her somewhere else. Or, you know,

that doesn't sound, and we have fought, and we have said, no, let us repeat the stats to you again. You know, here's what's going on. Here's what happened yesterday. Here's what happened in the day before

she needs to be seen today. Otherwise, we're going to have an issue. And in one case, there actually was just, as a sort of a shining moment of like sometimes it takes a moment for people to believe the work.

and get what we're doing it, Mommy. We had a patient that we advocated for. We said, you got to bring her in. We basically called ED. We're like, she's coming in. She's coming in tonight. And they said, no, no, hold her. Let her stay overnight.

She was checked on her. You know, she had an appointment two days from then, basically. They're like, give her 48 hours. She should be fine at home to rest. She had a baby about a week ago and had very high blood pressure. And the doctor said, hang on. She should be fine for the next two days. She has an appointment scheduled already.

She, by noon, the next. day was being driven into the hospital because she was having symptoms of basically like early stage of very, very scary symptoms for hypertension, like cardiac condition. And whether that was, that could have resulted in a stroke or a heart attack, in this case, what ended up happening was just like so amazing is that, you know, the doctor called back and was like, you guys were right. We should have just had her come in when you said she needed to come in. because to have that be a readmission that was unplanned versus let's just check on her, let's just bring her in for medication or for an assessment, was the right thing to do rather

than what this country has been doing for a very long time, which is waiting until stuff happens. Right. And then waiting for the patient to have an issue and then doing reactive health care. Right. But you know what? It hasn't happened again with that partner because they became true believers and they said, okay, when mommy calls, we're answering the call. Like if they call us, they have information for us.

And that's really the promise that we've made in this market is to say, we can handle a lot of stuff, we can help a lot of people. But if we call you and we have information about your patient, we're advocating for her to get care in that moment, you got to listen. So it's really all about that instead of, yeah, the outcomes are what they are because of that. We see lower premature delivery rates. We're able to literally keep people pregnant longer, so they make it to term. and we're able to reduce the rate of C-section and induction and, you know, really provide opportunities for safer childbirth experiences, for less risky childbirth experiences, because we're just, we're sort of staying the course alongside the patient.

And so when you have that person alongside you for your maternity experience, there's a level of trust and frankly, there's a level of compliance. like we're able to help people to sort of stick with the plan. Yeah. The mom who says, you know what, I've got to get back to my shift job. I work nights at this place and my boss won't let me leave early, won't let me take maternity leave early. I'm going to lose my job.

I have to go in. Yeah, but your doctor said you're at really high risk of delivering early and we've got to help you with that. Sometimes you have to actually connect that patient to an advocacy organization so that they can get educated in what their workers' rights are so that they can actually take time off from work so that they don't deliver early. these are the kinds of things we're talking about. It's very practical. It's not, it's not magic how you get the good outcomes. It just takes work. Yeah. Melissa Hannah is co-founder and CEO of Mommy doing the damn work. Congratulations on the raise. But most importantly, the livesafed. Thank you.