Maven’s Second Act

By Kate Ryder, founder and CEO

Today we announce Maven’s Series E round—a $90 million raise, led by General Catalyst with participation from CVS Health Ventures, La Famiglia, and Intermountain Ventures, bringing our total capital raised to $300 million and our valuation to $1.35 billion.

Despite the current economic storm, we’re not putting this capital aside for a rainy day. We’re investing in growth. We have a platform approach that is scaling with the needs of the market, and an underlying business model that has incentives purely aligned with the needs of the patient. And, most basically, women and families sorely need the innovation we’re driving.

Tellingly, this is the first fundraise where I haven’t felt the need to evangelize the problem we’re solving. Gaps in access to global fertility and family building care are front and center for employers, payers, and even governments. The overturning of Roe v. Wade created additional inequities in a system already riddled with them, in a country where 50% of counties don’t have an OB-GYN and where maternal mortality rates surpass those of all other developed countries. Maven’s platform supports members and clients navigating these issues and many more. We now cover 15 million lives, a 5x increase from last year, and we’ve grown our new business by 3x in the last year.

Yet this is hardly a victory lap. Changes in the world around us make Maven even more needed, but also underscore the stakes of getting our work right. These stakes are higher today than at any other point in our journey. Thinking very carefully about “how” we scale is more critical than ever. 

How we got here: Understanding problems to be solved and documenting our results

I’m immensely grateful to our colleagues, clients and market thought-leaders who have brought quality digital health for women and families into the commercial and investment mainstream over the past half decade. The market is now manifestly prioritizing women’s and family health. 

Employers, for instance, need to support working families in a system that is riddled with gaps in care and amidst an ongoing affordability crisis. They are most successful with diverse, inclusive workforces but also face the urgent priority of controlling healthcare costs in a challenging inflationary environment. In the last three years, gender equality in corporate America has declined, disparities in care have broadened, and maternal health outcomes have faltered. Employers need a platform with the breadth and flexibility to deliver for diverse workforces globally. And for payers, who manage diverse populations across America, everything comes down to driving better clinical outcomes while keeping costs controlled. A culturally competent care model to support socio-economically and racially diverse populations is table stakes. 

Maven serves forward-thinking organizations, employers and payers alike, with focus and compassion. We partner with 550+ clients and have members in more than 175 countries, providing access to high-quality care and financial support. We cover everything from financial reimbursement for fertility, adoption, and surrogacy, to return-to-work offerings and breastmilk shipping, to parenting and pediatrics virtual care and navigation, to menopause support. And we provide travel reimbursement benefits and pregnancy options counseling that is increasingly relevant for many of our clients. 

The core of our virtual care model is the largest telehealth network in women’s and family health, with 30+ types of providers across 350 sub-specialties. More than 30% of our providers identify as BIPOC, and 10% as LGBTQIA+. This enables a wider network of more holistic providers, and care matching that is impossible to offer in traditional brick-and-mortar settings. This in turn drives user trust and engagement. For example, only 5% of people in the United States are able to meet with a mental health provider during pregnancy whereas over 30% of Maven members report that we help them manage depression and anxiety. And we just presented at ACOG that Maven’s Black members use virtual care at almost 2x the rate as our white members, with particularly high utilization in birth planning, mental health, and with our midwives.

This trust, in turn, guides unmatched outcomes. First-time mothers who received guidance on birth planning with Maven are 27% less likely to have a C-section than those who did not, 25% of fertility members achieve pregnancy naturally without needing IVF, and engagement with a Maven Care Advocate is associated with a 7x increase in vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC).

What it takes to get care right

There are two fundamental truths about Maven’s strategy, our philosophy, and our capabilities that allow us to prioritize quality and to deliver on what we say. 

The first: Our business model remains, and will remain, fully aligned with the incentives of the patient. 

We talk a lot in this industry about technology as a great leveler for more patient-centric care. Part of starting a new healthcare company is that you have an opportunity—and a choice—to really live up to this. You can create a new system of care that doesn’t have misaligned incentives, that doesn’t overlook basic human needs. Maven wins when our members have better outcomes and get appropriate care. And when that happens, our clients win, too. 

As a few specific examples: We are not only an IVF company, and therefore we don’t need to drive people into IVF to make money. We don’t benefit when a patient has unnecessary IVF or egg freezing cycles. And with our maternity program, our incentives are squarely to drive better maternal outcomes at reasonable cost, enabling us to sign value-based contracts for our maternity population. And when we are driving costs down, it is by reducing unnecessary C-sections, preventing stays in the NICU, or optimizing a natural fertility rate to avoid IVF cycles—not by financial engineering or by squeezing patients or practitioners. Our product roadmap is aligned to building for member value. Deeply prioritizing patients and their well-being has been our north star to date, and it will continue to be. 

The second: Maven is a technology company and a healthcare company in equal measure. 

Maven is a technology company because we build for scale, and we personalize experiences. We have core capabilities—virtual care delivery, financial reimbursement, peer support communities, personalized care plans, and content—that we are able to scale into new product offerings at high velocity, without sacrificing quality within the member experience. 

At the same time, we are a healthcare company with a human-centered care model. When one of our clients recently tried out our menopause product, she said she was initially skeptical because we delivered the product so quickly to market. But after using the platform herself, she was impressed: her Maven experience was fast, reliable, and full of high-quality providers that were genuinely helping her. 

Maven has and will always have exceptional providers and compassionate care advocates who meet our members where they are. We invest heavily in provider and care operations to ensure that the Maven experience for them is also scalable, with high levels of service and a best-in-class experience. Provider-focused software was actually the first thing we built back in 2014 before Maven’s consumer launch in order to start to understand who our providers were, how they liked to practice, because our care is only as good as the exceptional providers and care advocates who provide it. This is why the lion’s share of this new investment is going directly to our product, clinical, and engineering organizations.

What’s Next

As I mentioned above, we will use this fundraise to invest in Maven’s growth, and to reinforce the progress we’ve made—ensuring that the products women and families need will be there for them, as a permanent feature of the healthcare system. 

Two areas where we see outsized demand for 2023, and will continue to invest, are global family benefits growth and Medicaid. The first requires a continuation of our virtual approach—with new features coming for Maven Wallet, our financial reimbursement platform, as well as within our core fertility and family building member experience. Medicaid requires a more localized approach, which must be more deliberate, but particularly in the aftermath of Roe, the need has never been greater. We’re committed to serving Medicaid patients with the same quality and attention to their experience that we have brought to every other market in which we’ve operated. 

Right now, amidst so much economic uncertainty and political divisiveness and even more restrictions on access to care, the world can seem like it’s falling apart. But we believe that we are still at the dawn of the age of better women’s and family healthcare. We believe that what comes next is simply uncreated, waiting to be put together. It is going to continue to be hard, full of challenges and with setbacks. Maven is here to see it all through. We are here for the long-term, and will be playing a large part in shaping the future of women’s and family health.