Pear Healthcare Playbook

This week, we’re super excited to have Carolyn Witte, CEO and Co-Founder of Tia.  Founded in 2017 by Carolyn Witte and Felicity Yost, Tia is blending in-person and virtual care services. Tia’s “Whole Woman, Whole Life” care model fuses gynecology, primary care, mental health and evidence-based wellness services to treat women comprehensively — a stark shift from fragmented care for different "body parts'' or life stages. Prior to founding Tia, Carolyn was a Team Lead at Google Creative Labs, developing and growing Google’s core mobile consumer products, Search, Maps and Translate. In September 2021, Tia raised $100M in Series B Round led by Lone Pine Capital.

This week, we’re super excited to have Rachel Blank, CEO and Co-Founder at Allara. Founded in August 2020 and based in New York, Allara wants to help women better manage chronic conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. It currently affects one in 10 women of childbearing age. Prior to founding Allara, Rachel was the Director of Strategy at Ro, where she launched their women's health brand, Rory. Rachel earned her MBA from Harvard Business School.

This week, we’re super excited to have Priyanka Jain, CEO and Co-Founder at Evvy. Founded in 2020, Evvy is on a mission to radically reinvent how we understand and treat the female body, starting with the vaginal microbiome. Prior to Evvy, Priyanka was the Head of Product at Pymetrics for four years and earned her Bachelor’s degree at Stanford University. In July 2021, Evvy raised a $5M seed round led by General Catalyst. Evvy was founded to serve the unmet needs of 30% of women in the US. The vaginal microbiome is one of those aforementioned signals as the cause of some of the most common conditions in women — yeast infections, recurrent UTIs, bacterial vaginosis, aerobic vaginitis, cytolytic vaginosis, etc. Not only are these conditions highly prevalent, affecting over 30% of women every single year, but these conditions are extremely debilitating to physical, emotional, and mental health and highly stigmatized. Vaginal infections have incredibly outdated diagnostics and treatments, as well as one of the highest recurrence rates in medicine

This week, we’re super excited to have Elizabeth Burstein, CEO and Co-Founder at Neura Health. Founded in 2020, Neura Health is a virtual neurology clinic with a mission to improve the access and quality of neurological care: increase convenience, improve outcomes, and lower costs. Neura Health's platform connects patients to neurologists, with built in neurology-specific symptom monitoring and condition-specific diagnostic tests.  The company’s first app focus is on chronic headache and migraine. Prior to founding Neura Health, Liz was the Head of Product at Maven Clinic and Director of Product at ZocDoc. Neura Health recently announced that they raised a $2.2M seed round with Pear VC, Norwest Venture Partners, Global Founders Capital, Index Ventures, and Next Play Ventures.

In this episode, we’re super excited to have Lucia Huang, CEO and Co-Founder at Osmind, the operating system for neuropsychiatry. Founded in 2020, Osmind provides software and data for precision mental health to help the 22M Americans with treatment-resistant mental health conditions. Prior to founding Osmind, Lucia was the Director of Operations and Finance at Verge Genomics, a next generation neuroscience drug discovery company. In July 2021, Osmind raised a $15M Series A led by Future Ventures! We’re a proud early supporter at Pear VC as well.

In this episode, we’re excited to learn from Vik Bakhru, Chief Health Officer at Circulo Health. Circulo is building the Medicaid insurance company of the future to provide tech-enabled, world-class care to the nation’s most underserved populations. Vik is also currently a member of the clinical advisory board at Bright Health and a practicing Staff Physician at UCSF Medical Center. Prior to Circulo, Vik was the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at SameSky Health (formerly Consejosano) for almost 4.5 years and COO of First Opinion. In February 2021, Circulo launched out of stealth at $50M led by Drive Capital, General Catalyst, Oak HC/FT and SVB Capital. 

In this episode, we’re super excited to have Connor Hailey, CEO and Co-Founder of Axle Health here with us today. Founded in 2020, Axle Health enables any healthcare organization to send health professionals to patients’ homes to administer blood draws, vaccines, injections and other physical services. We dive into Axle's founding story, the future of home health, landing their first pilot and then converting their pilots into expanded contracts as well as figuring out how to stack rank features during early stage product development. Axle Health has raised a $3M seed round led by Pear VC in Spring of 2021.

In this episode, we’re excited to learn from Pouria Sanae, CEO and Co-Founder of ixLayer, which provides an elegant solution for integrated health systems to easily deploy and manage affordable and reliable remote lab testing solutions. In March 2021, ixLayer raised an oversubscribed $79M Series A led by General Catalyst— Pear has been a proud investor in ixLayer since the pre-seed and seed days.

Manav Sevak, CEO and Co-Founder at Memora Health discusses the challenges in healthcare journeys, the development of their platform, the future of healthcare, and lessons on entrepreneurship and motivation.

Vivien interviews Tom Lee, founder of Galileo, One Medical, and Epocrates. They talk about the challenges of starting and running tech-enabled healthcare services. They discuss patient acquisition, differences in target populations, and the role of technology in serving underserved communities.