This $1.7 billion health startup started by serving mothers—now its CEO aims to reach all women
Before becoming a mother herself, Marta Bralic Kerns had already built a career inside the healthcare system, working as both an executive and a consultant focused on using data to improve patient outcomes. She understood the inefficiencies, the gaps, and the missed opportunities in care delivery. Still, nothing prepared her for her own experience with pregnancy.
Despite having excellent doctors and comprehensive insurance, Bralic Kerns found maternal care fragmented and impersonal. There was little personalization, limited use of maternal health data, and no clear guidance on how to optimize outcomes for her baby. The disconnect between what healthcare could be and what she actually experienced was jarring. As she later explained, it clashed sharply with everything she believed modern healthcare should stand for.
Motivated to understand why maternal care lagged behind other areas of medicine, Bralic Kerns began speaking directly with obstetricians and fetal medicine specialists. What she learned was alarming: roughly one in ten newborns ends up in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), often due to complications like preeclampsia—persistent high blood pressure that can frequently be detected and managed earlier in pregnancy. Drawing on her background consulting on Medicaid maternal benefits in Arkansas and her leadership role at Flatiron Health, a data-driven cancer care company, she realized she had the expertise to build a better system.
Building Pomelo Care to Fix a Broken System
In 2021, Bralic Kerns founded Pomelo Care with a clear mission: improve maternal and infant outcomes, particularly for patients covered by Medicaid—a group often facing chronic health conditions, inconsistent access to care, and social instability. While Medicaid patients were the initial focus, Pomelo soon expanded to include commercial insurance plans as well.
Today, Pomelo Care supports an estimated 25 million insured lives and is involved in nearly 7% of all U.S. births. The company partners with major insurers such as UnitedHealthcare and Elevance, along with large employer plans including Koch Inc.
Based in New York, Pomelo is named after the pomelo fruit, known for its thick, protective rind—a symbol of the company’s approach to safeguarding mothers and babies. The platform provides round-the-clock virtual care, using real-time data to identify pregnancy risks and continuously monitor patients. Simple, evidence-based interventions can make a major difference. For example, a low-dose aspirin regimen can reduce the risk of preeclampsia by 25%, but only if high-risk patients are identified early. Pomelo’s care model, fully covered by insurance and free for patients, makes that possible.
Lower Costs, Better Outcomes
Insurers are willing to back Pomelo because the financial case is compelling. NICU stays alone cost the U.S. healthcare system more than $25 billion annually. Pomelo’s results suggest a more efficient alternative: among Medicaid patients, the company reports a 15% overall reduction in care costs, alongside a 46% drop in emergency room visits and a 58% reduction in NICU admissions. These findings were shared at major medical and health economics conferences last year.
That performance helped Pomelo secure a major funding milestone. Bralic Kerns recently confirmed the company raised $92 million in a round led by Stripes, valuing Pomelo at $1.7 billion—more than triple its $500 million valuation from mid-2024. Andreessen Horowitz, Box Group, and other investors also participated. While Pomelo has not disclosed its revenue, it operates on a per-member, per-month pricing model.
According to Stripes partner Ron Shah, who led the investment, Bralic Kerns’ disciplined execution was a major factor behind the valuation jump. He pointed to Pomelo’s strong operational metrics, controlled spending, and growing revenue visibility through 2026 and 2027 as indicators of long-term momentum.
From Pregnancy to a Lifetime of Care
Bralic Kerns’ path to founding Pomelo was shaped early on. She holds a bachelor’s degree in government and computer science from Harvard and first encountered the complexity of maternal healthcare while consulting at McKinsey. In 2014, she joined Flatiron Health, which was later acquired by Roche for $1.9 billion.
It was during her time at Flatiron—and while pregnant with her first child—that the idea for Pomelo truly crystallized. She left the company in 2021, backed early by Flatiron cofounders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, who not only invested but also introduced her to key venture capital partners. Turner has spoken openly about his confidence in her, saying she was among a small group of people he would back regardless of the business idea.
As Pomelo scaled, Bralic Kerns dug deeper into maternal health data and found a consistent pattern: small preventive steps often lead to outsized improvements in outcomes and costs. Her own experiences reinforced that lesson. During her first pregnancy, she was advised to induce labor early due to a common infection. With Pomelo’s data-driven guidance during her second pregnancy, she instead waited for natural labor and received treatment at the appropriate time—an evidence-based approach that avoided unnecessary intervention.
Expanding the Vision Beyond Motherhood
Now, with fresh capital and proven results, Bralic Kerns is looking beyond pregnancy. Her goal is to extend Pomelo’s virtual, preventive care model to women at every stage of life, including perimenopausal and postmenopausal women, as well as children. She believes the same proactive, data-informed approach can help identify who may benefit from treatments like hormone-replacement therapy—areas where many women currently receive little guidance.
As she sees it, the opportunity is vast. Whether women are navigating their reproductive years, raising families, or entering midlife, preventive care remains inconsistent and underutilized. Pomelo’s next chapter aims to change that—transforming a company that began with mothers into a platform designed to support women for a lifetime.
