Investing in Maternal Health
By Perry Clarkson and Kelsey Jarrett
Maternal health in the United States is at a paradoxical moment. Despite advances across other areas of healthcare, maternal outcomes have not followed the same trajectory. In many cases, they’ve worsened. Access to care is increasingly uneven, shaped by geography, income, patient demographics, and insurance coverage. Provider shortages are intensifying, particularly in rural and underserved communities. At the same time, the clinical complexity of pregnancy is rising, with more patients presenting with chronic conditions, behavioral health needs, and social risk factors.
This is a structural issue touching patients, providers, and policy simultaneously. It is creating a growing gap between what maternal healthcare is expected to deliver and what it is currently equipped to provide.
For founders, that gap represents one of the most urgent and under-addressed opportunities in healthcare today.
Why Investment Hasn’t Yet Shifted Outcomes
Over the past several years, venture interest in maternal health increased. Capital flowed into the space alongside broader enthusiasm for women’s health innovation. But that influx of investment has not yet translated into meaningfully improved outcomes at scale, and US maternal mortality rates remain amongst the worst in the world.
Part of the problem lies in how innovation has been pursued. Many early models in maternal health aimed to fundamentally reconfigure the system — shifting primary care responsibilities away from obstetricians or attempting to rebuild care delivery from the ground up. While well-intended, these approaches often underestimated the importance of the obstetrician-patient relationship and the need for alignment across stakeholders. In healthcare, solutions that benefit one group at the expense of another rarely scale.
Durable models we’re seeing today take a different approach. Rather than displacing the system, they enhance it — expanding capacity, improving coordination, and enabling earlier intervention without requiring wholesale behavior change from providers, patients, or health plans, recognizing that all three of these stakeholders must be treated as partnersto innovation.
Expanding Access in a Fragmented System
If there is a single challenge that cuts across maternal health, it’s access — access to prenatal and postpartum care, behavioral health support, specialty care, clinically accurate information, social supports, and affordable services.
Gaps in access disproportionately affect patients in rural communities, those covered by Medicaid, and BIPOC individuals that have historically faced systemic barriers to care. In many cases, maternal healthcare is not simply fragmented, but functionally out of reach.
At the same time, structural pressures are making the problem worse. Workforce shortages across healthcare are limiting provider capacity at a time when demand for healthcare services continues to grow. Federal policy shifts have contributed to the spread of more maternal care deserts. The rise of unmoderated health misinformation is complicating decision-making for patients navigating pregnancy and postpartum care, as well as complicating providers’ ability to manage patients’ inaccurate beliefs or distrust in medical expertise.
For founders, this creates a dual mandate: expand access while also addressing the underlying structural constraints that limit it. The most compelling companies in this space are doing both. They are reaching underserved populations, as well as using data, care models, and reimbursement strategies to reshape how maternal healthcare is delivered and scaled. In doing so, they are turning access from a constraint into a catalyst for system-level change, while also working within that system.
Building Within the System: Lōvu and Origin
At SJF, our recent investments in maternal and women’s health reflect this perspective.
Lōvu Health is a virtual-first maternal care platform designed to extend clinical support beyond traditional prenatal and postpartum visits. Rather than asking providers to change how they practice, Lōvu builds around existing workflows, enabling continuous monitoring, proactive risk identification, and specialty care navigation between appointments. This model addresses one of the core limitations of maternal healthcare: many of the most critical changes in a patient’s condition happen outside of scheduled in-office visits with an obstetrician.
Just as importantly, Lōvu is focused on populations that are often excluded from consistent care, including Medicaid patients, BIPOC patients, and those in medically underserved areas. By combining access with continuous, data-driven support, the platform is not only improving patient outcomes, but also generating the clinical evidence needed to implement proactive personalized maternal care into the healthcare system over time.
Origin, by contrast, approaches maternal health through a more specific, specialty care lens. While the company’s pelvic floor and whole-body physical therapy (PT) offering spans a wide range of clinical conditions across a patient’s lifespan, its roots are in prenatal and postpartum care. What makes Origin compelling was its decision, at founding, to make pelvic PT accessible. Origin is one of the first providers to be in-network with major health plans so patients don’t have to pay out of pocket, and Origin is one of the only providers that offers in-person and virtual visit options.
Origin’s approach has played a meaningful role in bringing a historically under-appreciated form of specialty care into the clinical mainstream — raising awareness amongst both patients and providers, and showcasing the impact that pelvic PT can have on maternal health and several other conditions.
Across Lōvu and Origin, the throughline is clear: improving maternal health requires solutions that expand access to critical care now, as well as drive structural change for a better future.
A Call to Founders
Maternal health has had no shortage of new startups in recent years as founders and funders recognize it as a space with high need. What is less frequently acknowledged, though, is that the unmet need continues to grow in magnitude and urgency, suggesting that more innovation is required, particularly in novel and scalable models to care.
The challenges are well-defined: fragmented care, limited access, workforce constraints, and misaligned incentives. The demand for better solutions is not hypothetical, and the potential for impact is significant, particularly for models that can deliver measurable improvements in patient and provider outcomes while integrating into existing systems.
SJF Ventures is particularly interested in solutions that expand access to underserved populations, align incentives across stakeholders, and generate the data needed to drive long-term systems change. This strategy includes areas like specialty care integration (e.g., behavioral health, cardiac health, or hormonal health) and postpartum and pediatric models that address both maternal and infant health in a coordinated way.
Maternal health is not a niche within healthcare. It is healthcare, affecting long term outcomes for mothers and their children. Improving it will require a new generation of companies that are as pragmatic as they are ambitious.
If you’re building toward that future, we want to hear from you.
