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This CEO’s $1.7 Billion Health Startup Began With Moms. Now She Wants To Expand To All Women

Data-driven virtual care reshapes maternal health and expands to women across life stages.

by Forbes US
Pomelo Care founder and CEO Marta Bralic Kerns POMELO CARE
Pomelo Care founder and CEO Marta Bralic Kerns POMELO CARE

Former Flatiron Health exec Marta Bralic Kerns raised $92 million to expand her virtual care model to women at all stages of their lives.

Before she became a mom, Marta Bralic Kerns had worked in healthcare as both an executive and a consultant trying to use data to improve care. But even though she was deeply familiar with the industry’s problems, giving birth to her daughter was still a shocking experience. She had access to great doctors and health insurance, but maternal care seemed haphazard. Nothing was personalized. Her doctors didn’t reference much maternal health data to inform her care. She struggled to find good advice about how she could have the healthiest baby possible. “That was such a stark disconnect to everything I was working in healthcare,” she told Forbes.

So Bralic Kerns started asking questions of ob/gyns and fetal care specialists. She learned that one in 10 babies will be admitted to a neonatal care unit—far higher than she’d expected. Many of those admissions were for risk factors like preeclampsia, a complication that causes persistent high blood pressure, that could have been identified and treated earlier in the pregnancy. With her experience as a consultant on Arkansas’ Medicaid benefits for maternal care and as an early executive at Flatiron Health, which used data to improve cancer care, she decided that she could do better.

In 2021, she founded Pomelo Care to solve one of the most difficult problems in U.S. healthcare: how to improve maternal and infant care to patients covered by Medicaid, a notoriously difficult population to treat because of chronic conditions, lack of consistent medical care and often life instabilities. Pomelo now also works with commercial insurance. Today the startup covers 25 million lives and claims to support nearly 7% of all U.S. births. It works with major insurers that include UnitedHealthcare and Elevance, as well as big employer plans such as Koch Inc.

New York-based Pomelo, which is named for the large citrus with the hard, protective rind, delivers 24/7 virtual care, using data to flag patients’ pregnancy risks and monitor them continuously for issues. For example, a low dose of aspirin can prevent the risk of preeclampsia by 25%, an inexpensive solution to what can become a costly and traumatic NICU stay–but requires identifying the patients at risk early. The care is entirely covered by insurance and free for patients.

Insurers are willing to cover Pomelo because of the potential to reduce costs. NICU stays are particularly costly, adding up to more than $25 billion a year. Pomelo’s program reduced its Medicaid patients’ costs of care by a total of 15%, with a 46% reduction in ER visits and a 58% drop in NICU admissions, according to data it presented last year at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research.

“We built a care model to identify who is at risk for pregnancy complications and then deliver the best evidence-based care we know,” said Bralic Kerns, 35.

“The insurance companies have been struggling with this problem for a long time.”

Pomelo Care founder Marta Bralic Kerns
Now Bralic Kerns told Forbes that the company had raised $92 million led by venture firm Stripes at a valuation of $1.7 billion. That represents a more than three-fold increase over its previous valuation of $500 million in June 2024, according to VC database PitchBook. Andreessen Horowitz, Box Group and others also participated in the funding. With the new funds, Bralic Kerns plans to expand her virtual care model to women at all stages of their lives, including postmenopausal women, and children.

“She is a very disciplined operator,” said Ron Shah, a partner at Stripes who led the round. He’s been tracking Bralic Kerns since her days at Flatiron (where Stripes was also an investor). The company consistently surpasses its targets on metrics that include operating expenses and burn rate, he said. The new valuation “is a big jump, but if you look at the operating results of the company, it is much bigger, generating much more revenue, with much more traction and much more visibility around what 2026 and 2027 would look like,” Shah said. (Pomelo declined to disclose its annual revenue, but charges based on a per-person, per-month fee.)

Bralic Kerns, who has a bachelor’s degree in government and computer science from Harvard, got an early look at the complexities of maternal care as a consultant at McKinsey. In 2014, she joined health tech company Flatiron Health, which was founded by Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg to use data to improve cancer treatment. (Pharmaceutical giant Roche bought Flatiron for $1.9 billion in 2018.)

While at Flatiron, Bralic Kerns became pregnant with her daughter, who is now six, and had the epiphany that inspired her to start Pomelo Care. She left the firm in 2021. Turner and Weinberg were among her earliest supporters, investing in her business and introducing her to VCs. “There were four or five employees at Flatiron, who if they started a grilled-cheese company, I would put money into it,” Turner said. “Marta is in that small group.”

As Bralic Kerns delved into the data on maternal care, she learned that small changes in preventive care can have big impacts on the health of both mothers and babies—and on cost. “You don’t have to make a massive change,” she said. “It’s a classic case in healthcare where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

She’s seen the difference herself. During her first pregnancy, at 39 weeks, she was positive for a type of strep and her doctors recommended she go to the hospital for antibiotics and have labor induced. But for her second pregnancy, when she received care through Pomelo, she learned that a better, evidence-based solution is to wait for labor to occur naturally and receive antibiotics at that time — which is what she did.

“There were four or five employees at Flatiron, who if they started a grilled-cheese company, I would put money into it.”

Nat Turner, Flatiron Health cofounder

As Bralic Kerns started talking with insurers, she found them not just receptive, but almost desperate for a solution. “The insurance companies have been struggling with this problem for a long time,” she said. “We used to have a part of our PowerPoint deck where we would talk about the problem….Within 10 minutes, people would say, ‘I know, I know, get to the solution.’”

Bralic Kerns figures the same data-driven, virtual-care approach could work for perimenopausal and postmenopausal women, by identifying, for example, those who might be helped by hormone-replacement therapy. As she said: “Whether in their reproductive years and raising kids or in midlife and starting aging, women are not getting preventive care. It’s very clear it’s a large opportunity.”

Forbes US
Forbes US
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