Julia Cole, Tina Keshani, and Sophia Richter
(Illustration by Gisela Goppel)

When Tina Keshani (MBA 2020), Julia Cole (MBA 2020), and Sophia Richter (MBA 2020) met at Startup Boot Camp in their first year at HBS, they quickly discovered they shared a vision to create a company dedicated to women’s health.

“We’d all had experiences that left us feeling that the current health care system wasn’t serving us, as women,” Keshani says.

As the classmates explored potential startup concepts, they discovered some troubling statistics about maternal health in the US that gave them pause.

“Mental health conditions like depression and anxiety are among the most common complications for women, affecting one in five during pregnancy and postpartum,” says Richter. “And yet, the barriers to care, like high cost, long waitlists, and stigma, prevent the vast majority of women from getting support.”

Having friends and family who’d experienced these complications—and as young women hoping to start families themselves one day—Keshani, Richter, and Cole decided to change those odds. Over the course of their second year at HBS, they developed and launched Seven Starling, an online mental health clinic and community for expecting and new mothers.

Women seeking support for pregnancy, birth, or postpartum challenges can sign up with Seven Starling to access its specialized care. Services include one-on-one therapy sessions with clinicians board-certified in perinatal mental health, group therapy with other moms at the same stage, and medication if necessary. For added support beyond scheduled sessions, patients can use self-guided meditations and wellness activities on the Seven Starling mobile app and find a range of relevant stories and resources on the company’s blog.

“We partner with over a thousand OB-GYNs across the country who refer patients to us during the pregnancy and postpartum period,” says Keshani, Seven Starling’s CEO. “We work with every major health plan in the country and will soon be accepting Medicaid as well. We’re available in 10 states across the US and will expand to another 5 to 10 in the next year. We have really big plans ahead of us.”

The company’s expansion plans got a huge boost in July when its oversubscribed Series-A investment round raised $10.9 million, bringing the startup’s total funds raised over three tranches to $14.3 million. The Series-A round “is a huge milestone for us as a business—and for the advancement of women’s mental health care, more broadly,” says Cole, Seven Starling’s chief people officer. “We’ve treated thousands of patients with our specialized clinical model. This new funding means that we’re able to help even more women gain access to the mental health care they deserve.”

Seeing how the company resonates with investors, clinical partners, and patients alike has been gratifying for the cofounders, who have been honing the concept since their first meeting at Startup Boot Camp. “We spent our entire second year working on different iterations, getting feedback, and leaning on all the resources at HBS,” says Keshani.

Those resources included the Rock Accelerator program, which helped the trio fund their minimum viable product (MVP) research. They spent most of their free time at Harvard’s I-Lab, hashing out every aspect of the business, and enlisted faculty to help them work through models. Professor Ryan Buell, who teaches Managing Service Operations, played a key role in guiding their early ideas for the startup and currently teaches a case he wrote about Seven Starling. “I am so grateful for the incredible support systems we had—particularly the professors who took the time to mentor us and encourage us to take the leap together into entrepreneurship,” says Richter, the company’s COO. “There are so many lessons on leadership and entrepreneurship that I still reference daily.”

Like any startup, Seven Starling has evolved. Its initial platform focused on providing mothers with a community of support through online peer groups. But in following the patient journey, the cofounders quickly discovered women needed more services and pivoted to their current model within a year. “We saw that women were suffering from anxiety, depression, and birth trauma,” notes Keshani. “We weren’t able to clinically treat them with our original MVP, and it wasn’t covered by insurance. So many women need these resources, but the services have to be affordable. Being able to work with insurance plans was a big priority.”

Since refining the model and establishing a team of clinicians, Seven Starling has been reaching and serving women via its primary acquisition channel of doctor referrals. To measure impact—“in true HBS fashion,” Keshani says—the team captures data points across services via several automated dashboards. “We see that over 90 percent of our patients have a statistically significant improvement in their symptoms when they complete a program. That is truly best in class. It’s proof that we need tailored solutions for women that more effectively treat these conditions, and to create a safe space that enables them to seek and get help. We’ve had a massive impact on women already, and it’s just the beginning.”

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