Return on Impact: Meet Three Founders Reimagining Care

Innovation can come from any and everywhere. Our job at Pivotal Ventures is to lift up those voices, to find those entrepreneurs, to find those investors and get them the capital that they need to bring their ideas forward. My husband was diagnosed with ALS and he was told that he had six months to live and every doctor visit we went to can be summed up with the headline of, I'm sorry, but I can't help you and you should get your affairs in order. When we looked around and we realized that that kind of care is not readily available to most people in this country, we decided to build it. My name is Sandra Abrevaya and I am co-founder and CEO of Synapticure. We provide access to specialty neurology care nationwide. My brother has a rare autoimmune disease and we experienced firsthand what it's like to get care and with all of our privilege, my mom felt like she wasn't listened to or supported and really had to advocate for herself. We really wanted to create a solution that didn't leave families alone and really redefined what it meant to support families and family mental health care. I'm Rebecca Egger, CEO and co-founder of Little Otter, a digital health company that does pediatric and family mental health care. I was in my late thirties and I was trying to build a family and for me, it wasn't going well. I went through six rounds of failed fertility treatments, ultimately a natural pregnancy and then as I moved through my pregnancy, I saw the gaps in the patient experience and that became the turning point. I knew we could do better. I knew how to create change within our system given my professional background and that led to Millie. My name is Anu Sharma, I'm the founder and CEO of Millie. We are redesigning maternity care for the modern generation. We invested in Millie and Snap2Care and Little Otter because really we were thinking a lot about the caregiver and what are the areas in which throughout their life they are most burdened. What if we could find companies that are solving problems both for those areas of high burden, but also that we're thinking about the caregiver in the delivery of that solution. Investment funding really gives you the opportunity to experiment, which I think about a lot in Little Otter is that family mental health a couple of years ago did not exist and I think there's a lot of folks who've been working on this, but I'd like to take some credit that we've brought that into the conversation and now there is a family mental health market where people know what it means when you say that and venture funding gives you the ability to try out new communication, messaging and figure out what works. I used to be a management consultant. I did a lot of corporate strategy and M&A type work. A lot of my work was during Affordable Care Act, the years leading up to it, the other side of it. I've seen a lot of change in the industry. When I started building Millie, there really weren't that many women's health oriented funds to redesign maternity care from the ground up. We basically said, we need to have right-sized care with a model that includes midwives and OBs working collaboratively. That's how the rest of the world does it. We know what families need. They need access to experts in neurology care. They need support on demand 24 seven. When we wanted to start providing care to families living with neurodegenerative diseases, the only way we could reach all 50 states quickly was with venture backed support. What's become clear to me as I've learned and grown is that you need to trust the people that are closest to the problem and listen to how they are thinking about solving it. That's what we want to back at Pivotal are these visionary founders who see real world problems facing our care system, our healthcare system, our care economy, and are building solutions to solve them. If you've had lived experience with the problem you're trying to solve, you know enough to build the business. You have to be resilient. These are hard spaces. If you believe in your mission, take the next step. It'll take you one step closer to your goals. I think I've learned over and over while building this company is like, trust your gut, follow what makes sense. This is a tremendous time to be building and investing in this space. I'm incredibly excited about the opportunities that we're seeing.