Women and family health startup Maven raises $90 million for post-Roe v. Wade world
Founder and CEO of Maven Clinic Kate Ryder, the first female health tech unicorn, valued at $1 billion.
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Maven, the women and family health startup, has raised $90 million in a new fundraising round, and in a tough environment for venture funding.
The round, led by General Catalyst and with CVS Health Ventures, Intermountain Healthcare’s VC arm and European venture firm La Famiglia participating, brings Maven’s total capital raised to $300 million. Maven reached unicorn status last August in a $110 million round right before the bottom dropped out of the tech sector. While the downturn in tech is forcing down rounds for some startups, Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder said in a blog post the latest deal raised its valuation, albeit slightly, to $1.35 billion.
Maven has benefitted from greater focus on women’s health, particularly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade. Ryder recently told CNBC that the company saw a 67% month-over-month increase in opportunities from companies looking for travel benefits, as well as other health-care support for pregnant women, after the SCOTUS decision.
“Because we’re in the market, because we had a platform that we were able to access, we were able to jump up and step up with our products,” Ryder said at the recent CNBC Work Summit.
Maven Clinic has experienced a broader increase in demand for its products over the past two years amid a pandemic and tight labor market, which she attributed to the accessibility of its virtual platform as well as its outspoken support of health equity.
“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,” she wrote in the blog post.
Maven now reaches 15 million members, a 5x increase from last year, across its 450-plus corporate clients and payers (insurance companies) in over 175 countries, and the platform supports over 30 provider specialties in 30 provider languages. Maven Clinic was ranked No. 19 on the 2022 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
Maven clients have included Microsoft and L’Oreal. Past fundraising rounds attracted successful American women including Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, Natalie Portman, and Reese Witherspoon.
Ryder has said in the past that her determination to create Maven came partially as a result of her own medical frustration and trauma. A miscarriage left her feeling “lost, discouraged, and confused why something so painful and physically taxing was considered outside the bounds of traditional healthcare,” she wrote in a blog post.
With the new funding, Ryder said the company needs to be careful about how it scales, but will not be conservative with the cash despite the current economic environment given the need to invest in growth opportunities. “We’re not putting this capital aside for a rainy day,” she wrote on Monday.
Global family benefits growth and Medicaid are two areas that Maven is prioritizing with the new funding. The family benefits will build off of the virtual platform that grew during Covid and include new features for Maven Wallet, the company’s financial reimbursement platform. Additional Medicaid expansion requires “a more localized approach, which must be more deliberate,” Ryder said, “but particularly in the aftermath of Roe, the need has never been greater.”
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Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.
Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.
Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.
Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.
“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.
Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.
DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.
The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.
SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.
Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.
“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.
The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.
AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.
Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.
WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software
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