UK-based bladder health startup Jude has closed a $4.24 million seed round to expand into the U.S. Bladder Health: Jude Jude is a healthcare and wellness brand with a mission to bring bladder care to the forefront. 2.3 billion globally suffer from bladder issues, whether overactive bladder, leaving or incontinence and Jude is on a mission to help change that. Jude’s initial focus is on women’s health, as founder Peony Li said she wants to establish the business as a category leader in a space that’s been overlooked and hasn’t
Walgreens Boots Alliance has announced the departure of its CEO, Rosalind Brewer. According to Bloomberg, Brewer was the sole remaining Black female CEO of an S&P 500 company; the last Black woman to lead an S&P 500 company was Ursula Burns, who left Xerox in 2016. Like many retailers, Walgreens faced challenges this year as the demand for COVID-19 testing and vaccines declined, and retail sales experienced a slowdown. Brewer’s departure is part of the company’s transition into a healthcare company instead of a drugstore. According to CNBC, shares of
Ariana McGee founded Navigate Maternity, a remote monitoring platform facilitating equitable prenatal and postpartum care for pregnant women. Black Women and Pregnancy In 2017, over 1,205 women died during and after children, with the U.S. having the highest perinatal mortality rate of any developed country. The United States is also known to be the most dangerous and expensive high-income country for childbirth, especially for Black and Indigenous women. Black women face a nine times higher risk of maternal death than their white counterparts, regardless of wealth. McGee nearly lost her
Empowering Motherhood: The Black-Owned App Revolutionizes Pre And Post-Natal Care Through Technology
The Aster app was created to help women keep track of their pregnancy, communicate with a care team on the app and book appointments and remote monitoring. Founder of Aster FiFi Kara created the app after witnessing her family’s distress as her nephew was brought into the world. “After an emergency CAT 1 C-Section delivery, he required over seven minutes of resuscitation before he took his very first breath,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “The fact that both my nephew and sister are now thriving feels like a miracle, yet this narrative is sadly
EXHALE, a well-being app for Black women and women of color, shared its findings from a report that almost 2 in 5 (36%) Black women have left their jobs because they felt unsafe. The State of Self-Care for Black Women report EXHALE recently published its “The State of Self-Care for Black Women” report based on its survey of 1,005 Black women in the U.S. The report states that while diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are expected in institutions today, fostering safe spaces for Black women requires more specific resources to focus on their
Over 70 years after Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells were taken without her knowledge, her family finally settled with Thermo Fisher Scientific, a biotech company they say profited from them. Henrietta Lacks Lacks was a Black mother of five who died of cervical cancer in October 1951 at 31. She had learned she had cervical cancer eight months before her death when she was admitted to a racially segregated ward at John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. Following a tumor biopsy, doctors saved a sample of Lacks’ cancer cells without telling her and
Blair Matthews, a Howard alumnus from Zanzibar, and Giuliana Zaccardelli founded a digital health startup with a mission to provide fertility services to families. Zuri Fertility Zuri Fertility was launched in honor of Infertility Awareness Month as a personal digital fertility clinic in June, Zuri meaning good and beautiful in Swahili. They provide personalized fertility care with an online questionnaire to meet each individual need, a home testing tracker for both partners involved, a message center, and a larger community for the couple to get support from others. It also
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) went into effect this week and should help Black pregnant or postpartum workers get the accommodations they need to stay healthy and working. What is PWFA? PWFA explicitly gives pregnant and postpartum workers the right to temporary accommodations at work to keep them in their jobs during and after pregnancy. After being in the works for over ten years, the law has finally been passed, allowing millions of pregnant women to ask for what they need to help them in their position. A Bipartisan Policy Center poll last
The United States is the most dangerous and expensive high-income country for childbirth, especially for Black and Indigenous women. Drawing on her own pregnancy experiences, Emagine Solutions Technology co-founder and CEO Courtney Williams has developed The Journey Pregnancy app. This data-driven tool couples the power of technology with a human touch to ensure a safer and more informed pregnancy journey. Addressing Disparities in Maternal Healthcare Black women face a nine times higher risk of maternal death compared to their white counterparts, and it is not because of differences in wealth.
Helium Health, a Lagos-headquartered healthtech startup, has secured $30 million in Series B funding in the second-largest series B round for any African health tech company. Digitizing Healthcare Across Africa Founded in 2016 by Tito Ovia, Adegoke Olubusi, and Dimeji Sofowora, Helium Health has been a pioneer in is revolutionizing Africa’s healthcare sector through technology, finance, and data. The company’s suite of digital solutions includes electronic medical records, hospital management systems, insurance and billing software, and analytics tools. The company currently operates in eight countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, Kenya,
