Marta Bralic Kerns is the founder and CEO of Pomelo Care, the national leader in evidence-based healthcare for women and children. Since founding the company in 2021, Marta has emerged as one of the most influential entrepreneurs in healthcare, pioneering a new model of care that is improving outcomes, lowering costs, and expanding access for women and families across the United States.
Marta founded Pomelo to address the nation’s maternal health crisis after a career focused on healthcare innovation, value-based care, and reducing barriers to care. She recognized that traditional maternity care often fails to identify and address medical, behavioral, and social risks early enough to prevent complications. To solve this challenge, she built a first-of-its-kind care model that combines 24/7 virtual clinical support with local, in-person doula care.
Marta has also successfully scaled Pomelo into a category-defining healthcare company. In 2024, she led the acquisition of The Doula Network, the nation’s largest network of credentialed, in-network doulas, strengthening Pomelo’s ability to provide comprehensive support to families nationwide. In 2026, she led Pomelo’s $92 million Series C, bringing the company’s valuation to $1.7 billion and enabling its expansion beyond maternity care into care for women and children throughout every stage of life.
Before founding Pomelo, Marta was a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company, where she focused on healthcare payment reform and value-based care initiatives, including work with state Medicaid programs. She later joined Flatiron Health, where she served as Senior Vice President of Business Development and led strategic partnerships, product innovation, and new business initiatives that leveraged data and technology to improve cancer care.
Marta holds a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Computer Science from Harvard University.
Before I became a mother, I had already spent years working in healthcare, using data to improve care. I understood the system’s challenges intellectually. But experiencing maternal care as a patient was still shocking.
I had access to great doctors and good health insurance, and yet the care still felt lacking. It wasn’t personalized. It didn’t feel like my doctors were using the full breadth of available maternal health data to inform my care. And when I was trying to understand what I could do to have the healthiest baby possible, it was surprisingly hard to find clear, evidence-based guidance.
That disconnect was very stark for me. I had seen what was possible in other areas of healthcare, particularly at Flatiron Health, where data was being used to improve cancer care. But in maternal health, so much risk was still being identified too late, and not acted on early enough.
When I started talking with OB/GYNs and neonatologists, I learned how many NICU admissions are tied to risks that can actually be identified earlier. That was the beginning of Pomelo.
I love the weeds. I really do. I like understanding how things work in great detail, whether it’s clinical workflows, payer negotiations, product design, or the patient experience.
As Pomelo has scaled, I’ve had to learn when being in the weeds is helpful and when it becomes a constraint. Earlier on, it was important for me to be close to everything. We were building a new model of care, and the details mattered enormously. But as the company grows, my job is increasingly to make sure the right people are in the right seats, that we are aligned on the highest-priority problems, and that teams have the context and trust they need to move quickly.
I still believe great operators need to stay close to the details. But leadership at scale is about knowing which details require your attention and which ones require you to get out of the way.
The next chapter of women’s health has to be about outcomes and accountability.
Over the past several years, there has been tremendous investment and momentum in the category, which has been important. But now we have to ask a harder question: did that investment actually translate into better clinical outcomes for women and families?
That is where I think the conversation is moving. It is not enough to measure funding growth or engagement metrics. We need to look at whether companies are improving outcomes, lowering costs, and building trusted, continuous care relationships. Response times, continuity of care, access outside traditional clinic hours, sustained patient engagement, and clinical and financial results all matter.
For Pomelo, we’re seeing that proactive, longitudinal care can drive meaningful clinical and financial results at scale, including reductions in preterm births, NICU utilization, and emergency room visits, alongside strong ROI. That is the bar the industry should be moving toward.
Work with great people and the rest follows.
Building Pomelo has reinforced that lesson every day. We have incredible leaders across obstetrics, pediatrics, nursing, behavioral health, lactation, and doula care, many of whom have been with us since the earliest days. We've also built an exceptional team of technologists, operators, and business leaders who have enabled us to scale. We now cover nearly 7% of births in the United States.
There's no world where one founder could build a care model and company that spans every stage of a woman's life. It only works because we've brought together experts across every part of the business who genuinely want to build something better for women and families.
Our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Isabelle von Kohorn.
Founders often get a lot of attention, but companies like Pomelo are built through deep partnership and trust. I started Pomelo with a clear vision for how technology and data could transform women's healthcare because I understood the systemic problems we were trying to solve. But I also knew I needed an extraordinary clinical partner who could imagine and build an entirely new model of care from the ground up.
Finding that partner in Isabelle has been one of the great privileges of building this company. It takes an enormous amount of trust and intellectual honesty to create something that has never existed before, and we've been able to challenge each other while always staying focused on what's best for patients and partners.
Under her leadership, our clinical team has built a care model that is improving outcomes for women and children across the country, publishing peer-reviewed research, and helping set a new standard for maternal care. Working alongside her has made me a better leader.
Chocolate ice cream. I do try to hide it from my kids, though.
I'm glad we're finally talking more seriously about sleep.
For most of my career, getting by on very little sleep was almost worn as a badge of honor. There was this idea that the less you slept, the more committed or productive you were and the more successful your company would be.
I'm glad we're moving away from that. More people are recognizing that sleep is foundational to almost every aspect of health, from mental wellbeing and hormone regulation to long-term disease prevention. It's one of those simple things that can have an outsized impact, and I'm happy to see fewer founders bragging about surviving on two or three hours of sleep a night.
This is a terrible way to end the interview, but I honestly can’t name one.
I'm just not a big media consumer. Never have been. Between building Pomelo and raising young kids, I don't have a lot of downtime. And when I do, I focus on the kids and sleep!
