The owner of Politico is said to be seeking $1 billion in a deal with Axel Springer.
Maven Clinic, which provides online health services to women and families, announced on Tuesday that it had raised a round of $110 million in funding, bringing its valuation to more than $1 billion, a first for a U.S. company in the women and family health space.
“I’m very excited for the vote of confidence not just in us but the category itself,” said Kate Ryder, the founder and chief executive of Maven Clinic.
“There’s a lot of research on the first 1,000 days of life, and if you just invest in that period — up to age 2 — you can have a huge return on investment across the rest of the system because those children have better tools to go through life,” she said.
Maven Clinic’s telehealth platform includes access to a network of providers, including fertility specialists, adoption coaches, doulas, lactation consultants, pediatricians and child care providers. Individuals can participate on a per-use basis, but the bulk of its business comes from companies, including Snap, Bumble, L’Oreal and Microsoft, that offer it as an employee benefit.
Within a week of Microsoft’s offering Maven Clinic as a benefit in March, 1,300 employees had signed up, said Sonja Kellen, a senior director of global health and wellness at Microsoft. Now, a few months in, 2,300 employees use the platform.
“You don’t really know how many people are on this journey — starting a family or building a family — until you launch something like this,” she said.
The company, which was founded in 2014, did not reveal current membership numbers. But it said its membership had soared 400 percent since the onset of the pandemic.
“Covid accelerated all digital health companies forward,” Ms. Ryder said, but people are also now “starting to prioritize health equity, women’s health and family health.”
The pandemic helped reveal the weaknesses in the patchwork of child care systems and the gender and racial inequities of the health system, and it made corporate executives focus on supporting and retaining employees with families, she said.
“All the trends kind of converged for us,” she added.
About 15 percent of the in-person referrals made through the platform are for child care support, and since March 2020, about a quarter of the appointments scheduled have been with mental health providers — an indication of the stresses and struggles of working parents.
Ms. Ryder next wants to lower the barrier to quality health care for lower-income families.
“A Medicaid mom who is Black and who is at heightened risk for maternal mortality — she needs a personalized Maven experience just as much as the member who is working at a company in Dallas or New York,” she said.
The financing was led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Lux Capital and included an investment from Oprah Winfrey.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/17/business/economy-stock-market-news/