Marta Bralic Kerns, founder and CEO of Pomelo Care, did not set out to build a billion-dollar women’s health company. She set out to fix a system that failed her. Speaking to Forbes, Bralic Kerns described how becoming a mother exposed a gap between the healthcare data she worked with professionally and the care she personally received. “That was such a stark disconnect to everything I was working in healthcare,” she said.
That experience still matters now because Pomelo Care is no longer just a maternal health startup. Valued at $1.7 billion following a $92 million funding round led by Stripes, the company is expanding beyond pregnancy into women’s health across the lifespan — a shift that reflects where digital healthcare economics are heading, not just where this company began.
The Real Impact on Pomelo Care and Maternal Health
Pomelo Care was founded in 2021 to tackle one of the most persistent and costly challenges in U.S. healthcare: improving outcomes for pregnant women and infants, particularly those covered by Medicaid. The population is medically complex, expensive to treat, and historically underserved — making it an unlikely launchpad for a venture-backed company.
Yet Pomelo’s data-driven, virtual care model has produced results insurers are willing to fund. The company now covers 25 million lives and claims to support nearly 7% of all U.S. births, working with insurers such as UnitedHealthcare and Elevance, alongside large employer plans.
Pomelo delivers 24/7 virtual maternal care, using continuous data monitoring to flag risks early in pregnancy. That early intervention can prevent complications before they escalate into emergencies. For insurers, the financial implications are significant: neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) stays alone account for more than $25 billion annually in the U.S.
“We built a care model to identify who is at risk for pregnancy complications and then deliver the best evidence-based care we know,” Bralic Kerns told Forbes.
According to data Pomelo presented at medical and health economics conferences last year, its program reduced Medicaid patients’ total cost of care by 15%, cut emergency room visits by 46%, and lowered NICU admissions by 58%. Those outcomes have positioned Pomelo not as a niche maternal service, but as a scalable healthcare infrastructure partner.
Where the Pressure Is Building for Pomelo and Insurers
Pomelo’s success has raised expectations — and scrutiny. Its valuation more than tripled from $500 million in mid-2024, placing pressure on the company to demonstrate that its model can work beyond pregnancy.
Insurers, in particular, are looking for solutions that extend across a patient’s lifetime, not just a single episode of care. “The insurance companies have been struggling with this problem for a long time,” Bralic Kerns said.
Maternal care offers a defined clinical timeline and measurable outcomes. Expanding into broader women’s health introduces new complexity: longer care horizons, less standardised treatment pathways, and more varied patient behaviour. To justify its valuation, Pomelo must prove it can replicate cost savings and outcome improvements across different life stages.
There is also competitive pressure. Women’s health has become one of the most crowded segments in digital health, with startups targeting everything from fertility to menopause. Pomelo’s challenge is to differentiate not through branding, but through measurable economic value for insurers — the same lever that powered its maternal care growth.
What Happens Next as Pomelo Expands Women’s Health Care
With fresh capital, Pomelo plans to expand its virtual care platform to support women at all stages of life, including perimenopausal and postmenopausal care, as well as children. The strategy is rooted in prevention: identifying risk early, intervening with evidence-based care, and avoiding costly downstream complications.
Bralic Kerns believes the same logic that improved maternal outcomes applies more broadly. “Whether in their reproductive years and raising kids or in midlife and starting aging, women are not getting preventive care,” she said. “It’s very clear it’s a large opportunity.”
This kind of rapid growth and strategic pivot echoes the trajectory of other consumer-focused health and beauty startups, like Fazit, where Aliett Buttelman and her cofounder navigated viral demand after Taylor Swift’s endorsement. See The Million-Dollar Exit From Corporate Work Is Reshaping How Professionals Measure Success for a deeper look at how founders manage hypergrowth.
Investors backing the expansion point to Pomelo’s operational discipline. Ron Shah, a partner at Stripes who led the round, has described Bralic Kerns as a “very disciplined operator,” noting the company consistently outperforms targets related to expenses and burn rate. Pomelo charges insurers on a per-member, per-month basis — a model that rewards sustained engagement rather than episodic care.
The next phase will test whether Pomelo can scale responsibly while broadening its clinical scope — and whether insurers will consolidate more women’s health spending onto a single platform.
The Bottom Line for Women’s Health and Virtual Care
Pomelo Care’s rise illustrates how maternal health can serve as a proving ground for broader healthcare transformation. By starting with one of the most complex and expensive areas of care, the company earned insurer trust that many digital health startups never achieve.
Now, the stakes are higher. Pomelo must show that pregnancy was not an outlier, but the blueprint. If it succeeds, the company could help redefine how preventive, virtual care is delivered — and paid for — across women’s health in the U.S.
