Ryder recounts that during the initial fundraising attempts, Maven proved to be a tough sell, especially owing to the venture capital industry being male-dominated. She found it difficult to get these investors excited about a solution for women that they just couldn’t relate to. But Ryder’s (and therefore Maven’s) luck has changed since then.

Fast forward to September 2018, when Maven successfully raised $27M in a Series B funding. This round was led by female partners at Oak HC/FT and Sequoia Capital, taking the company’s total financing to $42M. According to the terms of the deal, Sequoia’s first female investing partner in the U.S, Jess Lee, and Oak’s Nancy Brown will join Maven’s all-female board of directors.

The founder confesses, in an interview with Fortune, that Maven blossoming into a female-driven company is no coincidence. According to her, this online clinic is backed by a passionate bunch of people who truly feel for the cause. And who better to relate to women’s problems, than other women? In fact, 98% of the practitioners on the Maven network are also women.

“Health care today looks like retail did 50 years ago when you had a bunch of men talking about how best to sell pantyhose,” she told Fortune. “Maven is part of a larger trend where suddenly there are a lot of female entrepreneurs looking at women’s health—this is an enormous, highly engaged category.”

Doctor’s Appointments from your Couch

Maven App User Interface. Photo credit: Patient Care Online

This ‘largest women’s health network in the world’ allows individuals to easily book video appointments and send private messages to a community of 1200+ vetted health service providers (across 18 specialities). Women can avail consults from the comfort and privacy of their office or home spaces with Maven. This means no more inordinately long waiting periods for expensive doctor appointments or going down the deep dark hole of Googling solutions to health problems. Appointments are almost always booked on the same day, with just a few clicks.

Charges for Facetime on the platform range from $18 for a 10-minute consult with a midwife to $90 for a 30-minute session with a psychiatric nurse, according to the brand website. Apart from providing access to OB-GYNs, doulas, paediatricians and therapists, Maven also provides sessions with career coaches who specialize in parenthood transitions.  

Post consultation and assigning of a prescription, the online clinic sends the medication (be it birth control, antidepressants or UTI meds) to the patient’s local pharmacy. Additionally, users can post health-related questions on Maven’s clinic forum and have them answered by a panel of experts.

Signing up to this online health community for women is free and users need to pay only for the sessions they book. What’s more, this pay-as-you-go healthcare solution is lesser than or equal to the average insurance co-payment cost ($15 to $25).

The telehealth company also rolled out a Maven Campus, an online clinic for women on college campuses. College goers get unlimited access to same-day video appointments for $45 per month (for a month-by-month subscription)

In the midst of revolutionizing women’s healthcare, Maven tries to solve another pressing problem – that of managing patient records and thus personalizing the healthcare experience. Currently, moving health records from one provider to the next (even within one hospital) is still not a seamless process. But with Maven’s network of health care practitioners, there is always a central record of patient information that provides empanelled doctors access when the patient is referred to them.

Ryder’s Journey from VC to Entrepreneur

Maven Founder, Kate Ryder. Photo credit: The Lifestyle Edit

Sometime in 2012, when digital health was not yet a buzz-worthy subject, Ryder worked as an early-stage investor (at Index Ventures) covering this emerging sector. During this phase of her personal and professional life, she recognized a real gap in health services and products built with women in mind (especially relating to starting a family).

“A lot of my friends started having kids while I was working in venture capital, so I started hearing about the difficulties of having kids or postpartum depression,” Ryder told TechCrunch.

This brought injected a flurry of questions into her mind including why it’s so difficult to reach a doctor for something so basic as a basic urinary tract infection, and why the US has the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world.

So, she embarked on a mission to create a ‘better healthcare user experience for women’ –  Maven. And in April 2015, Maven officially launched its beta version for use by the public.

Today, Ryder (a mother of two) is at the helm of a successful brand, which recently witnessed a 300% growth (2016-17) and even named one of Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies of 2018.

Maven at the Workplace for Gender Equity

Even today, close to 43% of new moms drop out of the workforce within the first year after having a child. Ryder believes that part of the blame could be attributed to the lack of support from employers and corporate health plans. Not only does this cause women’s professional careers to take a beating, but it also leads to the company losing out on well-trained talent.

This puts considerable pressure on the HR departments to innovate and create a family-friendly culture, as maternity-related costs tend to be the #1 or #2 healthcare cost for companies.

In early 2016, the 15-month Maven maternity program was launched that supports employees who are pregnant and new parents. This helps bring down company costs by reducing high-risk pregnancies, C-sections, and unnecessary ER and pediatric visits. It also tries to normalize pregnancies and ease mothers back into the workforce, post their pregnancy. Through this on-demand care service, the portal claims to increase productivity and engagement, while attracting and retaining talent (especially the millennials).

Bottled Milk for Working Moms by Maven. Photo credit: Unsplash

Maven’s outcomes-based suite of corporate benefits is a chance for these companies to become more sensitive to the needs of its women employees. Personalized to include existing company benefits, the family benefits program enables working women to get unlimited access to the Maven network of health practitioners. They also provide access to a 24/7 health concierge that helps users navigate everything from childcare options to egg freezing discounts. The latter is especially relevant as the number of U.S. companies offering IVF benefit grew by 10% in 2017.

On its website, Maven also promises an easy rollout, of just 4-6 weeks – every HR manager’s prayer answered.

Los Angeles-based Snap Inc. adopted the Maven Maternity program and was enthusiastically met with a 95% enrollment rate and 20+ interactions between the provider and members. This scheme was reportedly such a success that Snapchat decided to add onto Maven’s fertility program, offering IVF/IUI and egg-freezing benefits. A number of other Fortune 500 companies have similarly partnered with Maven to provide their employees with these unique health services.

Invest in Women for a Brighter Corporate Future

The U.S. Telehealth market size is expected to reach $2.83B By 2022. Startups such as Nurx and Lemonaid are already working the space to provide patients with prescriptions and home-delivered pills. We also have Blink Health that gets users great discounts on home-delivered meds, while Heal is the doctor on call app. Yet, Maven is the only healthcare app for women of its kind that seeks to provide accessible wellness solutions to working and studying women.   

Owing to this marked differentiation and a genuine need gap in the market, Maven has reportedly grown 14 times, in the last 12 months.

With the latest round of funding the company plans to further enhance their B2B offering for employers and health plans, thus further modernizing family planning at the workplace. It will also expand its return-to-work care products, apart of which is Maven Milk – a nationwide breast milk delivery service for new moms.

Apart from its existing bouquet of services, there is much more that Maven can do to help women shatter the glass ceiling. As Ryder said to The Lifestyle Edit, “No one has innovated in the maternity benefits space for so long – and about 1 out of 2 babies are born on corporate health plans in the US. So I think we have an incredible opportunity to really help women get the care they deserve and to help corporate America save money on healthcare costs and retain more women.”

The post Maven – Online Clinic of the Women, by the Women and for the Women appeared first on Techweek.

But before startups like this Chicago-based firm attracted such investor and user interest, the industry was dominated by print. This was causing knowledge to be too expensive for high-school students.

In with the e-books and out with paper

Tim Haitaian (right) and Greg Fenton, co-founders of RedShelf

On average, textbooks and supplies for college students exceed $1,000 per year. While the ‘new book’ smell and ‘dog-eared’ pages can be nostalgia-invoking, they are slowly being relegated into the past thanks to pdfs and e-readers. This shift is sure to be gradual, especially as 92% of students in the US are still reading printed books according to a survey conducted by American University’s linguistics professor Naomi Baron. With edtech startups such as RedShelf, one thing that students will definitely not miss is the steep prices of higher-ed study material and books. By offering such student’s e-content for rent, 80% cheaper than the physical copies, RedShelf marks the advent of the paperless education era.

“There is no way that 10 years from now backpacks will be filled with paper textbooks,” said RedShelf CEO & co-founder Greg Fenton to builtinchicago. “Students expect great software in education just like they do with social media, online shopping, or game applications. Ultimately, this gives students more convenient options when purchasing learning materials.”

Much has changed since its debut (in June 2010) as just an e-textbook distributor.

According to a report in Crain’s Chicago Business, the 27-year-old founders Tim Haitaian and Fenton started off with software that helped copy shops (that prepare course packets for professors) convert teaching materials into PDFs. Today, while they still deal in course materials, their focus has shifted to online books, and the startup plays a much bigger role in shaking up the college learning ecosystem.

Both founders who were raised in Detroit, believe that students and professors needed greater digitalization in the learning environment. So they created a business model wherein they textbook digital copies are rented out, at a much cheaper rate than hard-copies. This seeks to slowly but steadily eliminate the used-book (resale) market, which currently chips away at publisher’s revenue.

“All publishers wanted to talk about was, ‘how do we get rid of used books and go digital?’ ” said Fenton at a bookfair. “I think it’s a snowball effect.”

Though book publishers would face a 60% drop in revenue per book sold, it would also mean getting the target group more habituated to using ebooks. This would in turn cause students, in the coming years, to buy from the publisher again instead of going to the resale market. The students also benefit as they always get the most recent edition of textbooks and study material at a fraction of the hard copy’s cost. What’s more, these ebooks are super-portable and environment-friendly.

That which makes these ebooks affordable are the tie-ups that RedShelf has with academic publishers and campus bookstores to digitize and disseminate their books to students. Owing to such partnerships, the edtech firm has become a one-stop-shop to gain access to academic content such as e-textbooks and even research papers. In fact, RedShelf has, so far, inked partnerships with the likes of Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Cengage, Macmillan and John Wiley & Sons.

Since 2012, RedShelf has struck deals with several colleges, educators, campus bookstores and publishers to offer improved means of learning in higher ed by streamlining the ‘selection, adoption, purchase, and distribution of digital course materials’.

Then in 2018, publishers further dropped prices to gain greater market share. This is why the average textbook at Redshelf is now priced at $39.24, from $53.11 in 2015. Similarly, the price of books from a competitor brand, VitalSource, fell from $56.36 in 2016 to $38.65 in 2018. Thus, the ebooks have now dipped below the ‘affordable’ (as categorised by VitalSource’s vice president of education for North America) $40 mark which the industry has been working towards for a while now.

Apart from the allure of price, RedShelf’s powerful e-commerce engine makes it easy for students to locate e-books and other digital course materials, via its website. It also has a proprietary browser-based e-reader, which allows students to consume e-content and even make notes and highlight important text.

The startup also has a B2B product called RedShelf Bookstore, which is a customizable campus service for in-store and e-commerce transactions. Not to forget its independent tool, called RedShelf Adopt, which streamlines the adoption process between bookstores and educators.

RedShelf Inclusive makes textbooks more accessible

Redshelf Inclusive access dashboard (PC : RedShelf)

A survey released in 2014 noted that 65% of students prefer not to buy a textbook because of price even with digital content firms bringing down costs. These youngsters also believed that not having the correct study material would lead to lower grades. To remedy this issue, from being just a transactions-based company, RedShelf also adopted the subscription model.

What students, of universities that tie up with RedShelf Inclusive, get is complete access to discounted eTextbooks, eBooks, course packs, OER, and publisher access codes that are integrated into learning management systems.

The hook is that the cost of this program is included in the student’s course fee, encouraging its adoption. Owing to this product strategy, RedShelf’s numbers show that only less than 6% of students opt out of the model. This means that teachers don’t need to worry about students having access to study materials from the very first day of class. Also, Redshelf believes that it could potentially lead to improved student learning outcomes. Research, conducted at one of RedShelf’s partner institutions, shows a 9% rise in students with grade “C” or higher (in the fall 2017 semester), as compared to a time when the program was yet not implemented. It also led to students of one of the partner institutions saving more than $330K in one semester, thanks to volume discounts.

The program also offers an analytics dashboard that gives teachers and campus administrators a window into what their students are actually reading. Such real-time ebook usage analytics also gives publishers insight into what improvements can be made to the books based on how often students are viewing content, where they are making annotations and so on.

The success of this inclusive model reflects in the 600% Y-o-Y unit growth the program has been experiencing. RedShelf Inclusive works with around 540 campus bookstores (to keep the content pipeline flowing) and more than 140 participating institutions. In fact, over two-thirds of the startup’s sales come from the inclusive access program.

Slow and steady wins the edtech-race

‘When we founded RedShelf, the higher education industry was still slow and hesitant to adapt to digital. We learned that to be successful, we couldn’t disrupt the industry — we had to work alongside it to improve the space. Since then, we’ve worked closely with our partners to accelerate the transition from print to digital,’ added Fenton.

It first saw an influx of capital in December 2013, with the $1M in seed funding from angel investors. This was followed by series A round in January 2015 ($2M) and series B in August 2016 ($5M).

The firm used the funds to expand its team size so significantly that by 2018 it had outgrown its previous three offices and occupied a new, 16,000+ square foot office. In a recent press release, RedShelf claims to offer 500,000+ digital titles across 400+ publishers and has partnered with 600+ campus bookstores. Over and above the 100+ employees currently on its   Redshelf expects to hire 20 to 40 new employees within the next year and a half.

Then in August 2108, RedShelf ranked No. 121 on the Inc. 500 list of USA’s fast-growing private companies. “The depth of our development teams will be vital to our product expansion,” said Fenton to builtinchicago.

Investors are upbeat about edtech, as investments hit a historical new record of $9.5Bn in 2017. Since 2014, the US edtech market has achieved a CAGR of 8.81% and is expected to touch US$43Bn by 2019, to accommodate more players. Of the textbook segment, Amazon has a ginormous 23% share and is working with various universities (Purdue, US Davis) to provide high schoolers with affordable digital content. Flatworld (e-books start at $29.95) and Chegg (save up to 90% on ebooks), Cengage ($119.99 for a semester’s e-subscription), McGraw-Hill (saves up to 70% on ebooks) also offer digital solutions just like Vital Source and RedShelf.

“I can’t say for certain where we’ll be in five years, but our success will depend on our ability to continue producing innovative products, strengthening our partnerships and scaling the company in a way that stays true to our core values,” said Fenton to builtinchicago.

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Founded by Morgan DeBaun, CEO and co-founders Aaron Samuels, Jeff Nelson and Jonathan Jackson in July 2014, Blavity is roaring to be the digital voice for black millennials. It offers a range of services: media commentary, insight and thought-leadership along with products and conferences. It is through its delivery of content (reaching 7 million black millennials) and technology-related services that the startup is poised as a frontrunner in changing how black millennials are perceived online.

Seat At The Table

Morgan DeBaun, from St Louis, always wanted to be an entrepreneur. When she went to Washington University in St. Louis, a predominantly white institution, some black students started to sit together at the lunch table. “Before we knew it,” she says “there would more than 20 of us… we would skip class and talk about critical race theories… That moment when everyone would come to the table from different classes, parts of the country, and ethnicities of the diaspora – that was Black Gravity, or Blavity”.

Founder Morgan DeBaun (PC: Blavity)

DeBaun wanted to take that sense of community and inclusiveness to black millennials all over the country. The desire was accentuated by everyday problems of how black millennials were consistently dismissed and misrepresented by mainstream media.

In 2014 when Debaun had a fulltime job and was building Blavity on the side,

Michael Brown, an African American teenager was shot by a white police officer. When Debaun saw the lack of media coverage around the grave incident or how polarized mainstream media was, she realized that there was a problem that had to be fixed. She told CNN, “Yes, I could have marched in the streets. Yes, I could have flown back to St. Louis, but really my unique contribution and the contribution of our Blavity team was being able to be a platform for people to get the word out about what was happening.”

She quit her job and sprung to action with Blavity, which had already started off as a video email newsletter curating the top videos of the day. But it wasn’t attracting any users. The team iterated and moved towards content marketing and started writing blogs. “The blogs,” Debaun says, “were getting thousand times more traffic than the videos themselves”. During the iterations, DeBaun also realized that neither were numerous black creators and artists getting the platform they richly deserved nor were alternate opinions being showcased.

Inspired by the need to create a safespace or an ecosystem for black millennials, Blavity started to put out blogs and promote artists. One such artist was Quinta Brunson known for her Youtube videos such as The Girl Who Has Never Been On A Nice Date and subsequent internet stardom resulting in massive social media following. DeBaun claims that Brunson was a Blavity find. Now DeBaun believes that as the artists have grown, so have they, to a point where DeBaun says, “half the content they now publish comes from the community”. Community-driven content, also used by numerous other startups such as Thrive Global, ensures that wider perspectives are heard and that Blavity doesn’t go down the rabbit hole of producing biased stories it accused mainstream media of producing.

Building An Ecosystem For the Black Community

From its launch in 2014 to September 2016, Debaun and her co-founders bootstrapped the startup, which, she believes gave them “the space to build a strong foundation without distractions.” Debaun has been vocal about the difficulties in raising money not only as a female founder of colour but also because of being unable to effectively explain her vision to investors. “The vision is of an entire world of products, websites, brands and experiences” for the ‘underserved’ black community. She has also spoken about a personal mental block of not believing in herself and her own vision.

However, what Blavity was selling in 2015 failed to appeal to investors. It pushed the team back to the drawing board to first, build numbers and then worry about the funding. After bootstrapping for a year, Blavity raised about $2.9 million in a seed round from MACRO, New Media Ventures, Base Ventures, Cross Culture Ventures, Harlem Capital Partners, the Knight Enterprise Fund and others in 2016 and 2017.

The funding is a testimony to the fact that black millennials are an active part of the U.S. market. While it is common knowledge that there is a wealth gap between white and black Americans, what isn’t known is how quickly black millennials are bridging the gap. According to a report by Nielsen, “black consumers have brokered a seat at the table and are demanding that brands and marketers speak to them in ways that resonate culturally and experientially”. This path-breaking shift has been possible because African Americans’ spending power has risen to reach $1.2 trillion annually.

Photo: Pexels.com

“Major corporations and agencies,” Debaun says, “who aren’t paying attention to Black millennials are simply missing out on a huge business opportunity.” Aided by the increasing spending power of the black community, Blavity is moving fast and has leaped beyond its content and video curation to launch a string of products and services.

It runs two conferences – a tech conference in San Francisco called Afrotech and a black women’s conference called Empowerher. Along with the Blavity website, the startup also runs 21ninety, a black women’s lifestyle brand.  The startup has also acquired two other startups: entertainment website Shadow and Act along with Travel Noire, a travel company delivering tools & transformative retreats to help travelers discover new places. With an eye on more than just ad revenue, the startup is taking bold decisions to benefit from, and help strengthen, the choices of the African American consumer and thereby ascertain that #BlackLivesMatter.

The post Blavity Is Proof That Black Consumers Are Rising appeared first on Techweek.

The NY-based startup, founded by Felicity Conrad and Kristen Sonday in 2016, had previously raised a venture round of $2 million and has investors such as Harlem Capital, MergeLane, Backstage Capital, among others.

The CEO of Paladin, Felicity Conrad, launched the company after closely experiencing the impact of pro bono work.

An attorney at a New York law firm, Conrad had taken up the case of a Colombian immigrant. The immigrant’s family was being deported to Colombia where their lives were in danger from a narco-terrorist organization. The man, a local Colombian politician, was being threatened because he had spoken out against the organization. Conrad fought the case pro bono as her employer absorbed her $500 an hour fee and won the immigrant and his family asylum in the U.S.

Conrad would later reflect that “winning his case was the most meaningful professional experience I had as a lawyer.” The Colombian man’s plight stirred a long-held desire in Conrad to help underserved groups and improve access to justice.

Absence of timely and cost-effective legal help can be a matter of life and death, and Conrad started thinking of ways to connect lawyers to such opportunities. While it helped that the American Bar Association (ABA) recommends the 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S. to aspire to 50 hours of pro bono work annually, about 80% of people who need free legal help don’t get it.

Conrad says that she had learned that “where there’s a huge unsolved problem, there’s an equal market opportunity”. So if the pro-bono industry was “disaggregated”, “manual”, and in other words – “broken”, there was an opportunity to solve it.

Felicity Conrad and Kristen Sonday, founders of Paladin (PC: Forbes)

She met Kristen Sonday through a mutual friend and they together “brainstormed ways to utilize technology to solve the access (to justice) problem”. The two founded the company in late 2016 and became one of the only 2% women to find venture capital funding in the U.S.

Opening Doors

By the end of 2016, the startup had already  beta matched 50 lawyers from companies like Birchbox, Blackrock and Oscar to pro-bono work but it perhaps wasn’t ready for the blitzkrieg that would soon arrive.

In January 2017, President Trump signed an Executive Order (EO) which prevented admission of nationals from certain Muslim countries for at least 90 days with immediate effect, and Paladin was flooded with calls. While Paladin redirected many lawyers to the International Refugee Assistance Project and ACLU at international airports nationwide, the situation reinforced the relevance of lawyers and the need of pro-bono work.

It also proved that many were keen on finding pro-bono work and that protecting democracy was the biggest of all cases.

PC: Paladin

The United States ranks 65th (in 102 countries) – along with Botswana, Pakistan and Uzbekistan – for the accessibility and affordability of its civil justice. Recent instances – from the immigration ban to the repeal of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the proposed Legal Services Corporation (LSC) funding cut, to the separation of parents and children at the border – have unequivocally and adequately established how difficult access to justice can be. They also establish the need  for companies like Paladin.

Pro bono work is not only a good practice, it can actually change the world. It was pro bono lawyers’ relentless fight that legalised same-sex marriages. It was the 1100 pro bono attorneys of the Trial Lawyers Care who took on cases for more than 1,700 families across the country and worldwide after 9/11.

However, situations of national emergency and incidents that spark mass outrage are different from equally painful, everyday fights. A startup like Paladin, then, acquires more relevance when it connects lawyers to individuals in need of justice.

How it works: Paladin asks interested lawyers to fill out a short profile outlining skills, interests and availability, and then delivers pro bono opportunities right to their inbox. It also throws in current events and information about causes the users were passionate about. But the scope of pro bono work – and the startup’s revenue model – involves much more.

Bridging the Justice Gap

The legal industry has been accused of an aversion to technology. Rightly so, as in the case of pro bono work, Conrad claims, that companies with in-house legal teams around the world run their global pro bono programmes through email, spreadsheet, and phone calls which costs them billions of dollars.

It’s tardy and inefficient. Paladin, therefore, has successfully sweeped in to offer a software which saves time, money and makes it easier for administrators to increase engagement. Paladin matches lawyers with pro bono opportunities and in turn, captures valuable data and insights for partners

Paladin calls itself the first-to-market global pro bono platform. In July 2017, Paladin was picked from 1000+ applicants, to join the Techstars community to receive office space and mentors in Chicago.

Paladin’s Software for Corporates (PC: Paladin)

Its subscription-based software is sold to Fortune 500 companies that have huge in-house legal teams, followed by law firms, bar associations, governments and then universities. As of October 2017, Conrad said that Paladin was being used by Fortune 15 customers like Verizon which is “using it to power their 448 lawyer strong global program”. Paladin also claims that deals with giants such as Google, Ford, Amazon to the Government of Singapore is in their pipeline.

Apart from making it easier for lawyers to find opportunities, Paladin is providing an effective alternative to companies who want to make pro bono a big part of their corporate social responsibility. Instead of getting employees to do low-value tasks, it is unarguably more effective if they are allowed to use their skills to create impact. Especially if the employees are lawyers who, as Marc A Cohen at Forbes notes, always serve two clients simultaneously– those that retain them and the larger society.

The post Paladin Connects Lawyers With Impactful Pro Bono Work appeared first on Techweek.