Sipra Laddha and Shama Rathi knew about the pitfalls of women’s health for close to a decade before launching their own solution.
The duo, both trained psychiatrists, spent years seeing women struggle to access affordable mental health resources while going through motherhood. When they became mothers themselves, they knew something had to change.
“Going through the process, there were no safety nets built at all; there was very little time and attention given to mental health,” Laddha said. “Hearing experiences from so many patients, then getting to see it from 360 degrees, there’s a lack of access to care. It’s not affordable, and now we’re seeing how long it prolongs suffering.”
The pair founded LunaJoy in April 2021 and, unlike the health care sector itself, have moved at a breakneck pace.
The online clinic launched in October 2021, and at the end of the year, the company was accepted to the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program. The program buoyed the company to close a seed round of funding within four weeks of its opening, and it has ballooned from its initial 17 customers to over 500 today.
“It was an evolution of medical training and then being moms,” Laddha said. “We’ve known about this need for six to eight years, and we were doing it in our own practices, but this is an extension for women’s health in a scalable, sustainable way.”
The company offers a digital care clinic for women throughout their life span, starting with puberty throughout perimenopause. It provides in-network therapy, medication management and coaching. It has partnered with industry giants Cigna and Optum and offers physicians, therapists and coaches who are all trained in mental health.
It is a pay-per-visit subscription model, which can be covered in part through insurance or out-of-pocket, costing “significantly less” than other community health offerings.
“This is getting back to the root and makes our society, businesses and children healthier,” Laddha said. “It is wide-reaching and affects all of us, whether or not you’re pregnant.”
Both women are first-time founders, which Laddha said works in their favor.
“In some ways, it’s made us a bit shameless,” she said. “Being part of the [startup] ecosystem, there are rules. But we have skipped all that — if we need something, we reach out. We’re able to be resourceful.”
A pitfall, though, is the lack of available capital. It’s nothing new to female- and minority-owned startups. According to Pitchbook, in 2021, women-founded startups received just 2.4% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups. And according to Crunchbase, 2.4% of funding from 2015 to 2020 was given to minority-founded startups.
Even with the credentials of the Y Combinator and now the Tampa Bay Wave’s TechDiversity cohort, LunaJoy is still finding its funding footing.
“Being a female, not from the startup world, has been part of an interesting journey,” Laddha said. “The other thing is, maternal health is a really easy problem to ignore. We’ve seen the global impact, but it’s a different perspective when you’re an investor and used to investing in general health, or fintech, that has been given a lot of time and attention. But it’s an incredible economic opportunity, and we’re very lucky to have investors who recognized the potential early on.”
The company has an oversubscribed seed round that is yet to be announced and expects to raise a Series A in the next eight to 12 months. They have six full-time employees, with 20 providers.
Laddha lives in Atlanta, while Rathi lives in St. Petersburg. The company claims St. Pete as its home base and is licensed for 17 states across the nation.
“The one thing we’ve been consistently really excited about is there’s been a lot of excitement around innovation in Tampa Bay,” Laddha said. “All the conversations we’ve had have been incredibly positive. There’s a lot of innovation going on around the country, but the reception in Tampa Bay has been incredible.”
