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The Flex Company
Flex creates innovative period products that are better for menstrual health and the environment. The Company is known for its namesake Flex Disc, Softdisc, and Flex Cup. The Flex Co exclusively manufactures its patented products in the US and in Canada. Its products are sold online and through major retailers in the US including Wal-Mart. Led by Founder and CEO Lauren Schulte Wang, The Flex Co team is working to create life-changing experiences through the products they make and conversations they spark.
Founder
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Lauren Schulte Wang spent over a decade building leading consumer brands, holding leadership roles at Upwork, Samasource, Autodesk, and Coca-Cola. She didn’t intend to become a founder, but after experienced frequent yeast infections sparked from use of tampons and pads, she stated seeking alternative solutions. She hosted groups of menstruators at her small San Francisco apartment to talk about periods. After helping many women, she realized that the company chose her, not the other way around, and founded Flex. She went through YC in 2015. Lauren published an article on how to get into YC, including her entire application in the article (here).
The Flex Co’s website here.
HQ: Los Angeles, CA
Industry: Consumer Goods
Vertical: Menstruation
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Gabbi
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Gabbi was founded with a mission to empower and inform women of their risk for breast cancer. Founded from a personal family death and her own diagnosis, founder Katilin built Gabbi to ensure women had a way to advocate for themselves with physicians with data when it came to breast cancer diagnosis. From that vision came Gabbi’s main product - GRAM- a risk assessment tool that evaluates a user’s breast cancer risk in the following two years. Based on those results, Gabbi also provides action plans based on a user’s risk assessment in an easy-to-understand consumer-facing app.
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Founder Kaitlin Christine is passionate about the problem young women face when seeking out breast cancer diagnoses and has experienced it first hand. Kaitlin started her career in nonprofits where she co-founded a non-profit focusing on mental health and helped publish a book focusing on mental health. She then worked at Myriad Genetics in business development where she helped increase patient engagement, secure partnerships, and implement protocols. She also worked at Worth eCommerce, where she focused on revenue growth and team building. She was named Oregon’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2021.
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Gabbi’s website here.
HQ: Portland, OR
Industry: Digital Health
Vertical: Cancer
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Hera Biotech
Founded in Feb 2020, Hera Biotech is developing the world’s first non-surgical test capable of both staging and diagnosing endometriosis. Hera’s test, MetriDxTM will take diagnostic capability out of the operating room and place it directly into the hands of physicians treating these patients. MetriDxTM will revolutionize the way that women with endometriosis experience diagnosis, drastically reduce time to diagnosis, and enable informed clinical management of the disease. Hera Biotech’s core technology was developed by scientists from UT San Antonio. Hera has been the recipient of a number of non-dilutive funding, including a grant from The Endometriosis Foundation of America. Hera was the winner of the Kendra Scott Pitch Competition, the Health Wildcatters and MedVentures Deal Day Pitch competition, and a top 3 in Ignite Fire Pitch Competition and the San Diego Angel Conference.
Founder
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Somer Baburek is an experienced leader in life science start-ups, including Rx drug development, clinical operations, FDA regulation, and achieving successful exit. Somer spent 7 years as the Director of Clinical Ops for Santalis Pharmaceuticals (founded by Paul), and worked as a consultant to Target Technology Funds (venture fund run by Paul) for 7 years.
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Hera’s website here.
HQ: San Antonio, TX
Industry: Healthcare
Vertical: Endometriosis
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Maude
Launched in April 2018, maude is an essentials brand on a mission to make intimacy better through quality, simplicity, and inclusivity. Working closely with familiar factories, each of maude's body-safe products are made to be both easy-to-use and to elevate an everyday experience. Voted one of CircleUp's 25, the company was heralded as “redefining the sex essentials industry for modern consumers" by Forbes and has been featured in 1000+ pieces of press including The New York Times, Fast Company, and Vogue. Maude is now available online at Sephora.
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Éva Goicochea
An early Everlane alum, Éva is one of only 15 LatinX women to have raised over $7M in consumer goods and one of the few founders to have raised over $10M in sexual wellness. In 2019, she was chosen as one of Entrepreneur magazine’s first-ever 100 Powerful Women , WWD called her one of 2020’s and 2021’s 60 Power Players in Health and Wellness, and in 2021, she was selected as one of Forbes Next 1000.
Maude's website is here.
HQ: New York, NY
Industry: Consumer Goods
Vertical: Sexual Wellness
​O.School
Deep Connection Technologies is a sexual wellness platform, including O.school, O.shop and O.insights. O.school is a trusted online destination for sexual wellness education, including science-based articles, videos, and tools on subjects ranging from vaginal pain to closing the orgasm gap. They also have a proprietary and dynamic dataset around sexuality that we have developed into consumer insights. O.shop will launch in Fall 2022 as a tool for consumers to vet, compare, and easily purchase sexual wellness products online.
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Founder and CEO Andrea Barrica as a modern sextech expert and the author of Sextech Revolution, the Future of Sexual Wellness. Before founding O.school, Andrea served as venture partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at 500 Startups in San Francisco, CA, where she helped thousands of founders and early stage startups globally raise $60M+ in venture capital. Andrea built her first startup, YC-backed inDinero.com, in 2010, and led the team to over $3M ARR, personally closing $1M ARR in 10 months, and advised 300+ startups on their back office needs. inDinero was recently ranked #90 as one of YC’s 100 Top Companies and continues to grow as one of the best accounting solutions for growing businesses.
O.School’s website here.
HQ: San Francisco, CA
Industry: Media, AdTech
Vertical: Sexual Wellness
WILE
Wile is a plant-based hormonal wellness line for 40-plus. Their line of supplements, tinctures, and powders are available online, at Grove Collaborative, Whole Foods Market, and Walgreens. Created in partnership with endocrinologists and naturopaths, Wile is led by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs.
Founders
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Gwendolyn Floyd (CEO) is a venture-backed serial social entrepreneur. She is a Founder of 5 companies, and has 18 years of experience leading teams and projects working at the intersection of social innovation and culture change. Her work in human centered design has been celebrated and awarded for its novel approach and measurably high social and economic impact.
Corey Scholibo (COO) is the former founder of Repurpose, the leading brand in plant based tableware. He is motivated by founding businesses that change culture to help the environment, create visibility and markets for underserved/excluded demographics, and change human behavior for the better.
Julie Kucinski (CMO) is a co-conspirator to entrepreneurs, founders, outliers and changemakers. Positioning, innovation, brand story & market opportunity are sweet spots.
Judy Greer is an American actress and comedian. She first rose to prominence in the late 1990s to early 2000s, appearing in the films Jawbreaker, What Women Want, 13 Going on 30, 27 Dresses, and Love & Other Drugs.
WILE’s website here.
HQ: Portland, OR
Industry: Consumer Goods
Vertical: Menopause
Malama Health
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Malama Health aims to improve maternal and childbirth outcomes related to high risk pregnancies. Malama's first product replaces an archaic pen and paper system for pregnant people diagnosed with gestational diabetes, a condition that affects nearly 1 in 5 pregnancies. Their HIPAA-compliant remote monitoring makes it easy for patients and providers to track glucose and meal data.
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Founder and CEO Mika Eddy recognized the gap in offerings for women facing a common disease during her own diagnosis and built one for the modern world. She has a deep understanding in both healthcare and data from her time at L.E.K, DeciBio, a data company focused on providing tools in life science and clinical diagnostics, and UnitedHealthcare, where she was the Director of Product Innovation. Daniela Bahamon the CCO, and Co-Founder, brings a long tenure building products and successfully marketing them to the end user. She founded Maison Alma, a luxury goods label where she managed a remote multidisciplinary sales, operations, and communications team. Lastly, Orlando Li, the CTO and Co-Founder brings technical expertise and knowledge. Orlando has been a software engineer at multiple tech companies, most recently AirBnb.
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Malama Health’s website here.
HQ: San Francisco, CA
Industry: HealthTech, Digital Health
Vertical: Maternal
The Beans
The Beans is a platform designed to automate the finances of America’s caring professionals, who are disproportionately women. The 40M frontline employees represent the largest and fastest growing segment of the U.S. economy, and financial stress remains the top reason for these workers vacating their jobs. Financial stress is a Public Health Emergency, and lowering that stress among frontline workers will help to decrease their all-cause mortality and improve their quality of life. Additionally, the trickle-down effect for these caring professionals, including teachers, nurses, and healthcare employees, will be that they continue to care for others emphatically and improve outcomes of society-at-large.
The Beans founder and CEO Melissa Pancoast was a key member at Oxford that developed the first program proven to reduce financial stress, which served as inspiration for The Beans. Their platform is sold as a learning and development offering to employees, and has already helped many people on their journey to financial freedom.
The Beans website here.
HQ: San Francisco, CA
Business Model: B2B2C
Industry: FinTech
Vertical: Financial Wellness
Betterleave
Betterleave provides bereavement benefits to support those experiencing the death of a family member, friend, colleague, pet, or pregnancy loss. Their platform brings together industry-leading partners from death care, insurance, health systems and hospices, and mental health networks to provide grieving individuals with personalized administrative and counseling services. About 2.5 million Americans pass away each year, each leaving on average 5 grieving people behind. Yet, for many of these people, there is a critical gap in support and resources to navigate the professional, financial, and emotional challenges of grief and loss.
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Betterleave’s CEO, Cara McCarty, experienced this need herself when her mother suddenly passed away from a rare cancer. As an HR executive, she was motivated to build Betterleave “for HR, by HR” and take away the tremendous logistical and mental burden that falls upon grieving individuals pre- and post-loss.
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Betterleave’s website here.
HQ: Austin, TX
Business Model: B2B2C
Industry: Digital Health
Vertical: Mental Health
Sunfish
Sunfish provides financial solutions for all journeys to parenthood including IVF, surrogacy, egg freezing, and more. Infertility affects approximately 1 in 5 people in the US, and can be a very disheartening process. Over 14% of women in the US have used infertility services. Concurrently, according to Family Equality, 63% of LGBTQ millennials plan to expand their families in the near future. Across the board, there is a demonstrated need for fertility solutions, which unfortunately can be very expensive. Average costs of an IVF cycle can often be up to $50,000, while popular benefit providers cover around $15,000. There is a gap in financial products for this market.
Angela Rastegar, Founder and CEO, has a deep background in both fertility services (as a former Director at Circle Surrogacy), has previously launched a loan product within a PE-backed fertility group, and has worked with prominent health tech investing groups. She is supported by a team who have developed successful venture-backed, exited financial product companies.
Sunfish’s website here.
HQ: Los Angeles, CA
Business Model: B2B2C
Industry: FinTech
Vertical: Fertility and Family Planning
