Nessle, a platform that connects new moms and care providers, was recently accepted into Amazon Web Service’s Impact Accelerator program for underrepresented founders. The Richmond company was awarded $225,000 in cash and AWS credits as part of its acceptance, and founder and CEO Carly Buxton and Chief Technology Officer Michelle Cunningham will participate in a 10-week training program.
Nessle was one of just 25 companies accepted into the program out of more than 1,000 applicants. This particular program from AWS, the cloud-computing arm of Amazon.com Inc., is geared toward women-owned startups.
“It’s a huge deal for us and somewhat unexpected,” Buxton said. “I feel like we have been in a place where we have been trying to get a lot of people to believe in our business and create traction. It’s hard, but then a huge player like Amazon believes in us. It’s given us such a shot of energy.”
Nessle was founded in 2019 after the birth of Buxton’s first child. She did not have a support system to guide her through the stresses and challenges of being a new mom. That inspired her to start Nessle, a platform that connects new moms with experts who can help.
Nessle has been building out the platform the last few years and went live last week. It has no revenue.
“We have been in beta mode for a while,” Buxton said.
Nessle is self-funded, Buxton said, and has relied on grants and pro-bono work. The company was accepted into Richmond’s Lighthouse Labs accelerator program earlier this year. Buxton said a colleague gave her a list of around eight other opportunities for women and minority business owners.
“I decided to apply for all of them, and it was the only one that we were accepted,” Buxton said. “It was by far the most lucrative one. It was the best opportunity on the list. It felt like a moonshot, but wonderfully it worked out.”
Amazon has tried to gain a foothold in health care but has not found a model that works. Buxton believes Amazon wants to learn from Nessle’s approach to telehealth.
“Amazon has been trying to figure out telesupport, and they’ve done a lot of testing and pivoting,” Buxton said. “They have a lot of people really focused on it. And we are telesupport. So, we can slide in and just learn what they have learned. And they can lean on us. It’s just a wonderful partnership.”
She said the program is designed to get startups integrated into AWS. A large part of the program so far has focused on Amazon and the services it offers startups.
This week, Buxton and Cunningham are in Seattle for the program. They will return home — Buxton to Richmond and Cunningham to the Bay Area — and then participate in eight weeks of online training. They will finish the program at Amazon Web Services’ startup loft in San Francisco.
Buxton said Nessle might look to raise money in the future, but the cash and credits from Amazon are enough for now.
“With this we are able to keep the lights on until sometime next year when we are hoping revenue will boost us,” Buxton said. “We are considering taking on investment.”
