She couldn't make enough milk for her newborn. So she built the support system she wished she'd had - and wired it into the health plans of families in all 50 states.
Andrea Ippolito spends her days running SimpliFed, the Ithaca, New York company turning baby-feeding support into a covered benefit rather than a luxury. The product is a maternal health operating system: virtual lactation consultants, infant-nutrition guidance, and increasingly virtual OB care, available regardless of zip code, time of day, or whether a parent knows the difference between a latch problem and a supply problem. Families pay nothing. Health plans pick up the tab. More than 300 health systems and practices, plus TRICARE, Medicaid, and commercial insurers, sit on the other side of that handshake.
The detail that explains the company is not the funding round or the partner logos. It is a newborn named Mae, born early and underweight, who kept losing weight because her mother could not produce enough milk. Ippolito is an engineer. She had degrees from Cornell and MIT, a stint at the White House, and a startup already sold. None of it told her how to feed her own daughter. The support that finally helped was expensive, hard to find, and - she would soon learn - completely out of reach for most of the people who needed it.
Then COVID-19 hit, and the gap widened into a canyon. New parents were locked out of the in-person classes, lactation clinics, and support groups that Ippolito had leaned on. She did the engineer's thing: she looked at the problem as a system with a missing component, and she went to build it. "We could extend breastfeeding and infant nutrition support via telehealth to new parents," she has said. "This was how SimpliFed's online breastfeeding and nutrition support was born." The company name is the whole thesis in one pun - simplified, fed.
The most recent line in the ledger arrived in April 2026: an oversubscribed $10.8M Series A, led by Morningside and Hesperia Capital, with the AHA Social Impact Fund, Foreground Capital, and Elizabeth Street Ventures along for the ride. The money goes toward scaling the core lactation offering and adding virtual OB services - widening the window of care from a feeding question to the whole arc of pregnancy and postpartum.
Figures from public funding announcements. Total reflects cumulative capital raised across rounds.
Catch Ippolito mid-stride and the through-line is obvious: she keeps walking into the largest, most stubborn healthcare institutions and asking why they work the way they do. At MIT, while finishing a master's in engineering and management, she co-directed MIT Hacking Medicine - the team that throws hackathons where clinicians, designers, engineers, and patients are locked in a room until something useful falls out. A number of real companies have come out of those weekends.
One of them was hers. She co-founded Smart Scheduling, software to improve patient access to care, and athenahealth acquired it in 2016. Around the same time, the White House and the General Services Administration named her a Presidential Innovation Fellow, which embedded her inside the Department of Veterans Affairs. She liked the work enough to stay: as Director of the VA Innovators Network, she designed and ran a $10.5M program that handed frontline VA employees the tools to build their own fixes for veterans' care.
That is a useful line for understanding her. She is not the founder who romanticizes the leap. She is the one who maps the failure modes first. It tracks for someone who teaches engineering at Cornell, where she has held faculty roles in the College of Engineering, and who can describe a maternal-care gap in the same vocabulary she'd use for a control system.
"The biggest lesson I have learned is the importance of taking care of you and your family first, then the business."
"Partner with a co-founder whose skills complement yours - or recruit people with these superpowers if you don't have them already."
"Real change, enduring change happens one step at a time."
"We sought to redesign the experience for new parents to arm them with information to make the best decision for them."
There's a refreshing lack of mythology in how she talks about building. The engineer-turned-founder will tell you, without flinching, that learning digital marketing was "a completely new, humbling experience." She co-founds rather than going it alone. She credits the international board-certified lactation consultants she recruited as her proudest achievement, not the cap table. And she keeps a two-year-old named Mae nearby as a built-in reality check on the founder's worst habit - letting the business swallow the life.
SimpliFed is not selling an app to anxious parents at 3 a.m. and charging their credit cards. It is rewiring who pays. By making feeding support a benefit covered by TRICARE, Medicaid, and commercial plans, Ippolito moved the cost off the kitchen table and onto the insurer - which is the only way a service like this reaches the parents who need it most rather than the ones who can already afford a private consultant. That's a policy move dressed up as a product, and it's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from someone who spent years inside the federal government learning how big systems actually move.
Her stated aim is bigger than feeding: an optimal model for new families built on trusted relationships, healthcare partnerships, and policy shifts, in service of health and economic equity. Catch up to her mid-stride and that's where she's headed - one step at a time, by her own instruction.