She wanted to be a doctor. Instead she built the tool a younger version of herself was looking for, and runs it from Brooklyn.
Co-Founder & CEO, Aavia
Aagya Mathur runs Aavia, a hormone-health company headquartered in Brooklyn, where the day job is deceptively simple to describe and stubbornly hard to do: help people with ovaries read their own bodies. The Aavia app connects the dots between the ovarian hormone cycle and the ordinary stuff of a life - energy, mood, sleep, focus - and hands it back as something usable rather than mysterious.
Most founders pitch a number. Mathur pitches a reframe. The cycle, she argues, is not a monthly tax. It is a pattern, and patterns can be planned around. Her favourite line is that the goal is to make hormones "a superpower rather than something they are dreading." It sounds like a slogan until you notice the company keeps shipping features that try to make it literally true.
The traction backs the talk. Aavia has reached hundreds of thousands of users worldwide and climbed the Health & Wellness charts in the UK, Canada and Germany - and it got there, by the company's account, without paid advertising. For a consumer app in 2020s tech, that is the rarest kind of flex: people found it and stayed.
We see a world where people can use their hormone cycles to benefit them day to day - to make them a superpower rather than something they are dreading.
Rewind to MIT. Mathur had come up through the University of Virginia as a neuroscience major - distinction on the diploma, biomedical engineering in the mix, medicine on the horizon. The plan bent. A stint in consulting at Deloitte, where she did everything from commercial strategy to building Tableau dashboards, convinced her the more interesting move was business school. She landed at MIT Sloan and finished her MBA in 2018.
The company found her sideways. Two of her future co-founders, Aya Suzuki and Alexis Wong, met at MEMSI - a two-week MIT bootcamp that throws engineers, designers and tinkerers in a room and tells them to make something. Their first concept was a smart pill pack, sparked after Suzuki watched patients in a rehab facility struggle to take medication on schedule. A mutual MEMSI contact introduced them to Mathur. Three strangers, three different brains, one company.
Then they did the unglamorous thing. Before betting on a market, the founders surveyed hundreds of people about what actually weighed on their health. Hormone health kept rising to the top - underserved, under-discussed, and full of people who felt unseen. The data picked the mission. Aavia, and a patented smart pill case, followed.
Mathur credits Aavia's strength to how differently the three founders think - different majors, different instincts, and a willingness to argue. The friction is the feature.
"If you don't listen to and work with the end-user, the solution is not going to be something they like or something that's actually going to help them."
Forbes put my co-founders on 30 Under 30 - and told the world I'm over 30.
Her whole product philosophy is allergic to ego: design for the person holding the phone, or do not bother. The surveys came before the pitch deck.
Mathur builds in the open, sharing the founder's life candidly - including her own egg-freezing experience - instead of curating a highlight reel.
She talks about success as confidence going up and stress going down. Numbers matter; the feeling people walk away with matters more.
There is a quiet stubbornness in how Aavia grew. No paid-ads land grab, no growth-hacking sugar rush - just a product people told other people about. In a category crowded with apps that ask for a lot and explain little, Mathur's bet is the opposite: explain everything, ask for trust, and earn the next download by being useful today. The charts in three countries suggest the bet is paying off.
Ask her what Aavia is really for and the answer keeps circling back to agency. Give people the pattern, hand them the controls, and let them decide what to do with it. That is the whole company in a sentence - and, depending on the day, the whole pitch.
She started Aavia while she was still enrolled at MIT Sloan. The MBA and the company overlapped.
Neuroscience at UVA, medicine in mind - then a hard left into consulting and, eventually, entrepreneurship.
Both co-founders entered her life at MEMSI, a fortnight-long MIT bootcamp.
The team's early hardware - a smart pill case - is patented.
Hundreds of thousands of users, reportedly without spending a dollar on paid acquisition.
Her core idea: a cycle is a pattern, and patterns can be planned around - an advantage, not a burden.