EllenDaSilva

Text a pediatrician the way you'd text a friend

Open your phone, type out the rash, the cough, the 103-degree question you can't stop refreshing WebMD about, and a real pediatrician answers. Usually in under 15 minutes. That is Summer Health, the company Ellen DaSilva founded in 2022 and runs as CEO from New York. It is not an app you download and forget. It is a thread, the same place you text your sister and your spouse, now with a doctor in it.

The idea sounds obvious right up until you ask why no one built it. DaSilva has an answer, and it is not about technology. It is about money. "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome," she likes to say, borrowing from Charlie Munger. The incentive in American healthcare is the bill, and you cannot bill for a text message. So the text message never got built. She built it anyway.

Here is the statistic that started it all: after a child turns two, the average parent gets about seven minutes a year with their pediatrician. Seven minutes. For an entire year of fevers, growth spurts, weird sleep, allergic reactions, and the slow-motion anxiety of raising a small human. The other 525,593 minutes, you are on your own with a search bar and a parenting group chat. Summer Health is built for those minutes.

DaSilva did not arrive at this from a whiteboard. She arrived as a mother of three. The wait for an appointment ran two weeks. The wait in the emergency room ran two hours. Somewhere between those two numbers sat a vast, ignored middle: the questions that are not emergencies but cannot wait two weeks either. "As a mom of three myself, I know that parents sometimes just want a quick gut check or second opinion from a trusted, knowledgeable source," she has said. She was the customer before she was the founder, which is the kind of detail investors pretend not to love and always do.

She collected playbooks for a decade

Summer Health is not a first try. It is the thing DaSilva built after spending years learning, at close range, how companies actually get made. The resume reads like a deliberate apprenticeship in scale.

She started in finance at Barclays Capital, where she worked on more than $10 billion of IPOs and other primary issuances for technology and telecom companies. That is where you learn what a real balance sheet looks like and what public-market investors actually ask. Then she moved to Twitter, joining its business operations function early enough to help build it. While she was there, the company's annual revenue went from $100 million to $2 billion. You do not forget what a 20x looks like from the inside.

The most telling move came next. She joined Hims & Hers as employee number eight and led strategic partnerships, staying through the company's IPO. Number eight is a specific kind of person. You are early enough that the company is still an argument, not a fact, and you have to believe in it before the rest of the world does. DaSilva did it once for someone else's consumer-health company. Then she went and did it for her own.

Along the way she also sat on the investor's side of the table, as a partner at Rough Draft Ventures, the pre-seed fund tied to General Catalyst, and later as a Sequoia Scout backing early consumer companies. She even co-wrote a book about it, Pitching & Closing, a guide to startup business development. So when she walked into Sequoia to raise for Summer Health, she had once been the person in the other chair. From Scout to Sequoia-backed founder is a short sentence and a long climb.

She has an HBS MBA, earned with Distinction. But the more useful credential is the pattern: finance, then hypergrowth, then early-stage operating, then investing. Four vantage points on the same question, which is how you build something that lasts. By the time she founded Summer Health, she was not guessing.

Pediatrics is the front door, not the whole house

DaSilva is careful about what Summer Health is. It is not trying to replace your pediatrician. "We want to augment your primary pediatrician," she says, "to help with those moments where your traditional pediatrician's office might not be able to help." The pitch to families is a companion, the trusted text thread that fills the gap between the rare seven-minute visits.

But she is also clear that pediatrics is the start, not the ceiling. The company has expanded its text-based service into pediatric primary care, and DaSilva talks openly about a longer arc: reinventing how all Americans reach a doctor. Kids are the wedge. The wedge is sharp because parents are the most motivated patients on earth, willing to try a new thing at 2am because the alternative is panic. Win their trust and you have earned the right to follow the family.

The 2024 Series A suggests serious people agree. The $11.65 million round was co-led by 7wireVentures and Lux Capital, with returning backers Sequoia Capital, Metrodora Ventures, Box Group, and Shrug Capital, plus new money from Pivotal Ventures, the Melinda French Gates company, and Leaps by Bayer. The board that formed around her is its own headline: Alfred Lin of Sequoia, Deena Shakir of Lux, Alyssa Jaffee of 7wireVentures, and Chelsea Clinton of Metrodora. That is not a courtesy cap table. That is a bet.

What makes DaSilva worth watching is not that she spotted a gap. Plenty of people have stared at the same broken pediatric system and shrugged. She had the unusual combination to actually move it: the operator who scaled a $2 billion revenue line, the early employee who knows what number eight feels like, the investor who has read a thousand pitches, and the parent who lived the problem at midnight. Most founders have one or two of those. She brought all four to a category that punishes amateurs. The result is a company trying to make a doctor as reachable as a text, which, when you say it out loud, is the kind of obvious that only looks obvious in hindsight.