BLOOMLIFE RAISES $12.2M SERIES A ■ FDA CLEARS MFM-PRO WEARABLE FOR REMOTE MATERNAL MONITORING ■ RICHARD BRANSON'S EXTREME TECH CHALLENGE WINNER ■ J&J QUICKFIRE CHALLENGE WINNER ■ 18 INSURANCE PAYERS NOW COVER BLOOMLIFE ■ 13 PATENTS & 19 PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS ■ WHITE HOUSE PRECISION PUBLIC HEALTH SUMMIT SPEAKER ■ BLOOMLIFE RAISES $12.2M SERIES A ■ FDA CLEARS MFM-PRO WEARABLE FOR REMOTE MATERNAL MONITORING ■ RICHARD BRANSON'S EXTREME TECH CHALLENGE WINNER ■ J&J QUICKFIRE CHALLENGE WINNER ■ 18 INSURANCE PAYERS NOW COVER BLOOMLIFE ■ 13 PATENTS & 19 PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS ■ WHITE HOUSE PRECISION PUBLIC HEALTH SUMMIT SPEAKER ■
YesPress Profile — Maternal Health
Eric Dy
The engineer who watched his son fight for life in the NICU - then built the device to make sure the next baby doesn't have to.
PhD biomedical engineer. Serial dealmaker. Co-founder and CEO of Bloomlife, the San Francisco company building FDA-cleared wearables to let high-risk pregnant women stay home instead of running to the clinic every week.
It starts with a sticky patch. Eric Dy and his co-founder Julien Penders shipped a medical-grade belly sensor to 14,000 pregnant women across the US. Women stuck it on, tracked their contractions in real time, and Bloomlife's algorithm learned to predict labor onset. None of that was the point. The point was the question underneath: why are women with high-risk pregnancies still being asked to drive to the clinic five times a week when sensors can go to them?
Eric knows the answer from the inside. His wife's pregnancy involved gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, placental complications, and preterm labor. Their son spent his first month in the NICU. When you've lived the fragmentation of American maternal care - the missed signals, the late-night panic, the feeling that no one has a complete picture of what's happening - you don't build a consumer gadget. You rebuild the system.
Bloomlife started as the gadget. In 2014, Eric and Julien launched with consumer hardware and a vision. By 2021, Eric had made the harder call: shut down the D2C arm, go enterprise, and build toward the FDA clearance that would let Bloomlife operate as a clinical tool rather than a wellness app. "We realized running parallel B2C and B2B arms wasn't feasible unless we were a massive corporation," he said. That kind of clarity - acknowledging what you can't do - is what separates founders who last from founders who don't.
Quick Profile
RoleCo-Founder & CEO, Bloomlife
LocationSan Francisco, CA
Founded2014
StageSeries A (Sep 2024)
IndustryMaternal Health / MedTech
Team37 employees
Revenue~$7M ARR
Awards & Recognition
★ Fast Company World Changing Ideas
★ J&J Quickfire Challenge Winner
★ Richard Branson Extreme Tech Challenge
★ MedTech Innovator Award
★ White House Public Health Summit
★ IDEAS from Europe
The fact that the maternal health crisis is now front and center in public consciousness is also influencing professional societies, who recognize that traditional approaches are not working and that new solutions must be tried.
Before the belly patch, Eric spent four years at IMEC - Europe's leading R&D institute - as North American Business Development Manager. He closed 17 strategic partnerships worth $25M+ in revenue. One deal contributed to a $2.8 billion acquisition. When he talks about the "lengthy sales cycles" of B2B healthcare, he's not guessing. He ran those cycles, in microchips and cardiac monitoring devices and next-generation sequencing, before he ever had a company of his own.
That's the part of Eric's story that doesn't fit neatly into the "personal tragedy to startup" narrative. He came into Bloomlife already fluent in how large healthcare organizations buy things, what de-risks a partnership, and what makes a deal close. The consumer product was a proof of concept with dual purpose: it gave Bloomlife clinical data to publish (19 peer-reviewed papers), patents to file (13 and counting), and a dataset of pregnancy signals that no one else in the world had collected at scale.
The pivot to B2B2C in 2021 wasn't a retreat. It was a deliberate promotion of what was already working into the context where it could have the most impact. The wearable that 14,000 women used to track contractions became the MFM-Pro: an FDA-cleared, prescription-based device that measures maternal and fetal heart rates, integrates with clinical workflows, triggers real-time alerts to physicians through a partnership with PeriGen, and gets reimbursed by 18 insurance payers including Medicaid.
$230M+
Revenue From IMEC Partnerships
Deals closed as North American BD Manager, including one contributing to a $2.8B acquisition
$12.2M
Series A (Sep 2024)
Led by Kapor Capital & Noshaq, with RH Capital, 15th Rock Ventures, The Grove Foundation & others
The United States has the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world. That's not a statistic Eric uses to attract investors - it's the context in which every product decision at Bloomlife gets made. Maternity care deserts exist across rural America. Provider shortages make adequate clinical surveillance of high-risk pregnancies a logistical impossibility when the model requires women to show up in person. The FDA-cleared wearable sitting on a patient's belly at home, streaming data to her clinical team, isn't a luxury product. It's the patch that plugs a hole in a dam.
Bloomlife's current platform is already multi-modal: fetal monitoring through MFM-Pro, hypertension management, and diabetes management. The roadmap adds maternal mental health screening and social determinants of health assessments. Eric's stated goal is to build the comprehensive "full stack" connected care platform for high-risk pregnancies - a system that identifies risk, manages it in real time, and integrates with the clinical decision-making that happens at the OB's office or the hospital.
The company's 19 peer-reviewed publications and 15 patents give it a scientific moat that most digital health startups don't bother building. When Eric pitches Bloomlife to a hospital system or an insurance payer, he's not asking them to trust a consumer app. He's presenting clinical evidence, FDA clearance, and a reimbursement model that 18 payers have already validated. "We've shown that these services provide benefits to both patients and providers, and can be delivered in a financially viable way," he said at the Series A announcement. That sentence took ten years to be able to say honestly.
Our mission has always centered on enhancing birth outcomes by addressing technology gaps in maternal-fetal health screening.
- Eric Dy, on the Bloomlife B2B pivot
Career Timeline
From Cornell to the NICU to Series A
Cornell → UCLA
BSc Bioengineering at Cornell. Then MSc and PhD in Biomedical Engineering at UCLA, where he received the Chancellor's Graduate Fellowship - awarded to the university's top incoming graduate students.
2011 - 2014
North American Business Development Manager at IMEC, Europe's premier R&D institute. Established 17 new partnerships worth $25M+ in revenue. Strategic deals contributed to $230M+ in total revenue and a $2.8B acquisition.
2014
Co-founded Bloomlife with Julien Penders, driven by personal experience with a high-risk pregnancy and a son's month in the NICU. Raised initial funding and built the first consumer wearable contraction tracker.
2016
Bloomlife raised $4M for its D2C wearable pregnancy tracker. The adhesive belly patch ships to mothers across the US, collecting contraction data and building Bloomlife's proprietary maternal signals dataset.
2018
Spoke at the White House Precision Public Health Summit. Won Johnson & Johnson Quickfire Challenge and Richard Branson's Extreme Tech Challenge. Named Fast Company World Changing Idea. MedTech Innovator Award.
2021
Strategic pivot: shut down consumer (D2C) arm, doubled down on B2B2C enterprise healthcare model. Began building the clinical infrastructure, regulatory pathway, and payer relationships that the FDA-cleared product would require.
Jan 2024
FDA clearance for Bloomlife MFM-Pro - a prescription-based wearable device measuring maternal and fetal heart rates for home use or in-clinic. Partnership with PeriGen for real-time physician alerts on high-risk patients.
Sep 2024
Bloomlife raises $12.2M Series A led by Kapor Capital and Noshaq. Reimbursement secured across 18 payers including commercial insurers and Medicaid. Total funding reaches $24.5M. Team: 37 employees. ARR: ~$7M.
In His Own Words
What Eric Says
The healthcare industry is increasingly receptive to reevaluating how maternal care is delivered.
On the market landscape, 2024
Current practices in maternal healthcare are often outdated and cumbersome, relying heavily on frequent in-person appointments and manual processes.
On the problem Bloomlife solves
We realized running parallel B2C and B2B arms wasn't feasible unless we were a massive corporation.
We've shown that these services provide benefits to both patients and providers, and can be delivered in a financially viable way.
Series A announcement, September 2024
Our mission has always centered on enhancing birth outcomes by addressing technology gaps in maternal-fetal health screening.
On Bloomlife's core purpose
🎓UCLA's Chancellor's Graduate Fellowship is awarded to the university's top incoming PhD students - Eric earned it for biomedical engineering.
🧑💼Eric started Bloomlife in 2014 - the same year many credit with the birth of "femtech" as a named sector.
📋Bloomlife's belly patch shipped to 14,000+ mothers and built an algorithm to identify labor onset - a dataset that still underpins the company's AI work.
🏅Won Richard Branson's Extreme Tech Challenge - one of the few maternal health companies ever to win it.
📄15 patents, 19 peer-reviewed papers, 12 awards - unusually deep scientific credentials for a company with 37 people.
🏠Bloomlife is headquartered at 1931 McAllister St, San Francisco - a few miles from UCSF's maternal-fetal medicine center, one of the best in the country.
Watch
Eric Dy on Video
How Wearables Are Changing the Future of Maternal Health
The New Model For Maternal Care Delivery | LSI Europe '24
