My team and I started Maven three years ago as a scrappy group of healthcare outsiders with a big mission of better supporting the female patient and her family.
We saw firsthand the gaps in care that women face, particularly around access to birth control, fertility treatment, and pregnancy and postpartum care. We also saw that the “user experience” in healthcare — that is, what it feels like for an actual patient getting care — far too frequently is not the core focus of the system. As a result, patients are commonly left frustrated, dissatisfied, and deeply unheard.
These challenges still drive us. What’s changed, as Maven has grown and matured as a company, is that we have now mapped our path through the healthcare system’s tangle of bureaucracy, powerful interests, and misaligned incentives — and toward revitalizing the patient-provider relationship and putting power back with the individual.
We have also now raised over $15M, including a recent $10.8M Series A funding round. This funding has brought amazing new people to our team, advisory board, and board of directors, incredible new clients offering Maven to their employees, and has catalyzed partnerships with practitioners and medical practices strongly aligned with our mission.
Now, with our latest round of funding as fuel, we will be focusing on three main areas going forward:
First, we will build on a current point of strength in continuing to work with the best practitioners
Our vetted network of Maven Practitioners is, undeniably, the backbone of Maven. These remarkable individuals — now 1,000 of them — have dedicated their time, energy, and expertise to help us deliver exceptional healthcare. The stories of compassion from our Maven Practitioners are incredible: One pulled over to the side of a road and took a video call with a patient who desperately needed a UTI prescription; another helped a patient solve seven years of bladder issues on a 20-minute video appointment; a third took time out of her own vacation to counsel a new mom through postpartum anxiety in a series of video appointments.
These are just a tiny number of examples. We’ve served nearly 100,000 patients on our marketplace since launching the business in 2015. What keeps our patients coming back is a trust that, at Maven, you can always count on committed, caring, and personable practitioners who will go well out of their way to help you. We’re now not just able to deliver great digital care, but we’re helping patients find high quality practitioners in-person as well. For instance, we’re able to facilitate connections to patients’ local OB-GYN practices that have low C-section rates, and just as importantly, high patient satisfaction ratings on Maven. We carefully screen for excellence when we accept new practitioners (we turn away the majority of applicants). It is incredibly fulfilling to see the impact our providers have and the deep relationships they develop with their patients both on and offline.
Second, we are going big with our enterprise platform, Maven Maternity — and continuing to partner with companies to bring Maven to their employees
Before Maven even launched as a consumer platform, we started talking to employers to understand how best to help them deliver great healthcare to their employees. We heard that maternity was one of the top costs for self-insured employers — nearly 1 out of 2 babies born in the US are on corporate health plans — and that employee retention was a huge problem. To be exact, 43% of women leave their job after having a baby — yet many of these women say they would prefer to stay in their jobs but are anxious about transitioning back to work. Sub-standard postpartum care in the US and the lack of support specifically around returning to work both play a role here. There was no platform in the market to address these issues. So we built one.
In early 2016, we rolled out Maven Maternity to our first clients: a 15-month pregnancy, postpartum, and return-to-work program that top employers are now offering as a benefit to their employees. The cornerstone of this program, again, has been our network. Not only do members get on-demand access to Maven Practitioners, but our practitioner network has actively helped us shape the program to be as effective as possible. Maven OB-GYNs and Nurse Practitioners helped create our C-Section reduction protocols and high-risk case management. One of our fertility doctors, from the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine (CCRM), helped craft our new fertility program. And Maven’s back-to-work coaches directly designed the manager workshops we now offer clients to make their work environments better for new parents.
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