Company Dossier - Femtech
Almond ObGyn
The Los Angeles practice that tried to rebuild the OB-GYN visit from scratch - membership medicine, telehealth, and a midwife-led room full of expecting parents.
The Los Angeles practice that tried to rebuild the OB-GYN visit from scratch - membership medicine, telehealth, and a midwife-led room full of expecting parents.
Here is a fact about American health care that is both boring and astonishing: the OB-GYN visit has not changed much in decades. You wait, you fill out a clipboard, you get roughly seven minutes with a physician, and you leave. Almond ObGyn looked at that arrangement and did the thing startups do, which is to say it decided the arrangement was not a fact of nature but a business opportunity.
The company was founded in 2021 by Tara Raffi and Carly Allen, two high-school friends who reunited around an unusually large market: roughly 110 million American women who need annual gynecological care, most of whom, by the founders' telling, are not thrilled about how they get it. Raffi liked to cite a figure - about 75% dissatisfaction with OB-GYN care - which is the kind of number that in most industries would be a scandal and in venture capital is a wedge.
The model was explicitly borrowed. Almond wanted to be, in its own framing, the "One Medical for women's health" - membership-based, tech-enabled, coordinated, and available both in a physical Los Angeles clinic on Melrose Avenue and over telehealth. Patients paid an annual fee for access and convenience; Almond still billed insurance for the actual visits and labs. This is the part where you either nod because it is obvious or squint because getting insurance and membership fees to coexist profitably is a genuinely hard trick.
"The patient experience today is slow, it's incomplete, and ultimately it's delivering not great outcomes."
Almond's catalog spanned the full arc of reproductive life. The interesting move was not any single service - it was putting them under one membership and one care team, so that birth control, a Pap smear, a fertility question, and a perimenopause plan did not require four separate systems.
Around $250/year for platform access, a dedicated care team, personalized plans, and 24/7 text access - with insurance still billed for visits and labs.
Roughly $425 for a comprehensive annual visit: exams, birth-control counseling, period and infection management, and general wellness.
A flat ~$2,500 program of ten 90-minute, midwife-led group sessions with a consistent cohort - plus a designated OB-GYN for delivery.
Focused care for PCOS, fertility optimization, and perimenopause and menopause - the parts of women's health most often left uncoordinated.
Video visits and messaging that extend the LA clinic to members across California, without the drive or the waiting room.
The pitch that sounds simple and is operationally hard: text your clinician when something comes up, instead of waiting weeks for a slot.
The pairing is almost a case study in the complementary co-founder theory: one from strategy consulting, one from brand and entertainment. Identical founders argue; complementary ones divide the map.
A former McKinsey healthcare consultant who helped build an internal tech incubator. She left consulting not to sell software to clinics but to open one - a distinction that shaped the whole company. Named to Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250.
Came from the brand and marketing world, including work at CAA on global campaigns. Her fingerprints are the reason a medical practice ended up with a visual identity built around almonds and strawberries rather than the usual clinical blue.
Almond graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch and closed a $7M seed that November, led by True Ventures with participation from Offline Ventures. In femtech, where the product is a real clinic and not just an app, that money buys less runway than it looks.
Raffi and Allen found Almond (legally, Almond Life Inc.) to reinvent OB-GYN care and open a first clinic in LA's Beverly Grove.
Almond graduates from Y Combinator's S22 batch, reporting roughly $90K run-rate revenue around the time its clinic opened.
Closes a $7M seed round led by True Ventures, with Offline Ventures participating.
Featured by Forbes as an early full-service, tech-enabled OB-GYN; co-founders named to Inc.'s Female Founders 250.
Launches a flat-fee, midwife-led Group Pregnancy Care program - a packaged spin on the CenteringPregnancy model.
Public listings suggest the practice has wound down: the website returns errors and its YC profile is marked inactive. A reminder that momentum and unit economics are different things.
"Together with our expert team, we build a supportive nest that delivers better outcomes."
The uncomfortable backdrop to all of this is that the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country. That is the sort of statistic that gets cited at conferences and then filed away, and Almond's founders essentially built a company out of refusing to file it away. Whether a membership OB-GYN can move a number that large is an open question, but the framing - that fragmented, rushed care is upstream of bad outcomes - is hard to argue with.
What made Almond genuinely interesting was the group pregnancy program. Instead of the standard string of ten-minute solo appointments, it put a cohort of expecting parents at similar stages into the same room for ten 90-minute sessions led by a midwife, with a delivering OB-GYN attached. This is not a new idea - clinicians call it CenteringPregnancy - but packaging it as a clear, flat-fee product is a small, useful act of translation.
Almond ObGyn is a Los Angeles-based, tech-enabled obstetrics and gynecology practice that set out to be the 'One Medical for women's health.' Founded in 2021 by Tara Raffi and Carly Allen and backed by a $7M seed round out of Y Combinator's S22 batch, Almond blended in-person clinic visits with telehealth, 24/7 text access to clinicians, and membership pricing to cover the full arc of reproductive care - from birth control and annual exams to PCOS, fertility, group pregnancy care, and menopause.
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