When She Matters co-founder Jade Kearney started the company as an NYU graduate student, her goal was to train psychologists to be sensitive enough to address the needs of black women who suffer from postpartum depression, women who are often left behind or Ignored by medical professionals.
Since taking her company to her Techstars late last year, she's expanded that thinking to include working with the health care system to include a variety of issues related to black women and postpartum health.
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Today the startup announced a $1.5 million pre-seed investment. Her ultimate goal is to expand the platform to other underrepresented groups of women who have had similar experiences with postpartum care.
While focusing on anxiety and depression in women and connecting those women with a culturally sensitive therapist, I saw an opportunity to help with a range of postnatal issues, she said.
“We’ve since changed to focusing on [training] healthcare networks and independent healthcare practitioners. And we’re focusing on postpartum comorbidities. So that includes postpartum mental illness like anxiety and depression, but also preeclampsia and hemorrhaging, which are two of the biggest postpartum comorbidities that Black women experience,” Kearney told TechCrunch.
She says the new approach has enabled the company to move beyond just training individual therapists to healthcare networks where they sign up the entire network for cultural competency training, and these tend to be much bigger deals. “On average, when a hospital works with us, that contract is about $1.2 million and my favorite aspect of this is that we do not charge Black moms for therapy,” she said.
The way it works is the hospital buys a subscription to the app and gives patients access to it as part of the care package they offer. While moms don’t have to sign up, they have the ability to do so with participating healthcare providers for free.
The company currently has six employees and is hiring with plans to have 15 by the end of the year.
As for the future, Kearney is planning to expand the app further. “We just want to take the secret sauce that we have for Black women where we’ve made Black women feel comfortable and given them the tools to advocate for themselves, and we want to use that same approach for other folks,” she said.
The company has hired researchers and cultural experts for each one of those other groups to make sure that they’re giving the same amount of care and authenticity as possible, she said. Upcoming products will include “Ella Importa” for Latina women, “They Matter” for LGBTQ people and “Native Her” for Native American women.
As she told TechCrunch earlier this year, trying to raise money as a Black woman building a company aimed at Black women and other underrepresented groups has been challenging for her, a process that she says left her emotionally drained and physically exhausted. “I feel like so many people don’t believe you. And this is not only white venture capitalists. This is Black venture capitalists who continue the tradition of marginalizing Black female founders because they want to be part of the status quo. I do not have one Black VC on my cap table. I have angels that are Black, but I don’t have one Black venture capitalist investor,” she said.
But she has found plenty of allies along the way, people who believe in her vision and keep pushing her. She said in particular the Techstars experience really helped her flesh out the company, and CEO Maelle Gavet was a real mentor to her, helping her navigate the difficult path to this funding round. She also points to her new board members including Alexander Packard, president at Iora Health, who has been appointed her board chair, and Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, who is a member of the board, as two people who have helped her get to this point.
Today’s $1.5 million pre-seed investment came from Oxeon Ventures, Chingona Ventures, The Fund and Emmeline Ventures.
