Kate Ryder’s mission for Maven Clinic is elegantly simple and profoundly ambitious: “I want to be able to show up to every person who is thinking about starting a family, or in those early years of building their family,” she told Talks at GS. “And we’re showing up in the way you need us to show up.”
That promise — of healthcare that meets women where they are, on their terms — was forged in a moment of profound personal crisis.
In mid-2015, Ryder, then 11 weeks pregnant and newly arrived in New York City, began to bleed. With no local doctor, she turned to the fledgling platform she had just launched: Maven Clinic. A nurse practitioner on a video visit urged her to go to the emergency room, where she later miscarried. In the chaotic aftermath, no one in the ER had time for her questions.
Shattered and seeking answers, she returned to her startup. There, an obstetrician provided the reassurance and clarity she desperately needed, telling her she could, when ready, try again.
That intimate validation propelled her from patient to pioneer.
Today, Ryder is the founder and CEO of the largest virtual health platform for women and families, a system that once (and still) sees women’s health as a niche. Maven Clinic, now valued at $1.7 billion, is not only a testament to solving a glaring need but also a landmark achievement as the first female-led telehealth startup to attain “unicorn” status.
From writing for The Economist and helping former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson with his memoirs to now leading a platform serving millions, Ryder has leveraged every experience to “get into the guts” of a broken system.
She didn't just see a gap in care as her friends started families; she built a billion-dollar bridge across it, proving that when you innovate for women and families, you don't just build a better company — you build a better future for healthcare itself.
Journalist’s Eye Meets a Glaring Gap
Kate Ryder's path to healthcare revolution was paved in classic entrepreneurial rebellion.
Growing up in Minnesota as the daughter of a business owner, she interned at her father's marketing consultancy in high school and promptly swore off the family trade.
“I was a rebel,” Ryder told INC in an interview. “I said to my dad, as a very surly 16-year-old: I would rather put cigarettes out in my eyes than ever do anything like this.”
Heeding her father's subsequent advice to "go get other experience," she charted her own course. So she chose to build a career in journalism, writing for outlets including The New Yorker and Fortune.
Yet the entrepreneurial pull remained. While working as a Singapore-based reporter for The Economist, she launched her first business — a side-hustle online travel company geared toward group travel for the Chinese market.
It was, in her own words, a total failure. "I had no idea what I was doing," she admitted to The M Dash. But the short-lived venture was a crucial, if ill-fated, apprenticeship. It laid the direct groundwork for her next and far more consequential idea.
A pivot to covering venture capital and digital health in London gave her a front-row seat to innovation.
The gap in the health care system became personal for Kate Ryder just as her friends were starting families, quietly battling postpartum depression, infertility and miscarriages that affect one in five U.S. pregnancies. Amid a digital health boom spurred by the Affordable Care Act, she saw a void.
"Some cool ideas were starting to emerge, and it's like: Wait, nothing's focused on women," she explained to INC in an interview.
This is when she began to realize something new needed to be created. Since launching in 2014, Maven has become the largest virtual health platform for women and families, offering everything from obstetric care and fertility planning to pediatrics and mental health.
Ryder’s vision was never just digital convenience; it was a systemic overhaul. She speaks bluntly about the U.S. maternal health crisis, where mortality rates are the worst in the developed world, and 35% of counties are "maternity care deserts."
Ryder makes it clear this is one of the most dangerous times for a woman to get pregnant, attributing the crisis to a toxic blend of incentive misalignment, racial disparities, coverage gaps and provider shortages. In a fee-for-service system, she notes, "it's better business to do a C-section than to have a woman do a natural birth."
Maven’s model aims to flip that script. By providing continuous, preventive virtual support, Maven has demonstrated a 2:1 clinical return on investment for clients. There is even research suggesting that the startup’s services have led to a reduced risk of preterm births and lower C-section rates, shrinking costs and complications for patients and families.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a tragic validation of Maven’s model. "People stopped going to the doctor. Period," Ryder said while sitting down with Goldman Sachs.
With partners barred from delivery rooms, fertility clinics shuttered and pediatric visits avoided, Maven's network became a critical lifeline. The company worked with states like Massachusetts to rapidly launch support for Medicaid patients, proving its scalability for vulnerable populations.
But Covid was nothing compared to the on-coming storm.
The Fight for Funding and Rights
The idea faced immediate headwinds in a venture capital world dominated by men. Ryder endured about 40 rejections for her Series A round. Investors dismissed women’s health as a "niche" market.
Her breakthrough came when she found investors who lived the problem. Her Series A was led by a mother of three who was pregnant at the time. Subsequent major rounds were co-led by women from firms like Sequoia Capital and Lux Capital.
She credits Maven’s existence with the support of female investors. But Maven’s work has grown more urgent and complex since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturned Roe v. Wade. The ruling was a devastating step back, but the startup swiftly adapted, offering options counseling, clinic navigation and tools for employers to reimburse travel costs for care.
“I think the way in which a society treats its mothers and children, I think, is a reflection of its societal values,” went on to tell Kim Posnett at Goldman Sachs. “I think now that we're having these conversations about everything from gender to race to health equity is actually showing up in a lot of our conversations with payers [...] But it's been pretty abysmal, you know, two steps forward. One step back.”
Already, reports suggest many ob-gyns are fleeing those states. According to March of Dimes, more than a third of U.S. counties are now maternity care deserts, lacking even one obstetric clinician, a disparity associated with a higher risk of preterm birth.
The effects of this change have been dire. In Texas alone, maternal mortality cases grew 56 percent between 2019 and 2022, the year after its restrictive abortion law went into effect. Infant mortality has also spiked 7 percent across the U.S. since Roe was overturned. Meanwhile, women’s health and legal experts have raised concerns that fetal personhood bills could potentially curtail access to in vitro fertilization.
And press reports have documented instances of people dying during miscarriages in hospitals newly wary of intervention. Under the second Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress, these trends show no sign of abating. But that is not enough to stop her mission.
Now a mother of three living in Brooklyn, Ryder’s journey from journalist to patient to CEO has been fueled by equal parts personal passion and relentless data. She proved that women’s health is not a niche, but the foundation. And in building a clinic born from her own heartbreak, she is fighting to ensure no one else has to navigate theirs alone.
