She grew up around 12 doctors and decided the most useful thing she could do was translate them. Now she co-runs Kindra.
Most consumer brands hide the science in the fine print. Hasti Nazem put it on the label. As Co-CEO and Head of Product and Education at Kindra, she co-leads a New York women's health company whose pitch is almost defiantly unglamorous: 160-plus clinical studies, patent-pending peptide technology, estrogen-free formulations, and products that have been sampled by more than 7,000 board-certified medical providers. The marketing is the evidence. That was the whole idea.
Kindra makes intimate moisturizers, lubricants, vulva-safe bath products and supplements for women navigating dryness, sensitivity and the hormonal shifts of menopause and beyond. It is a category that the rest of retail still tiptoes around with euphemisms. Nazem and her co-CEO, Afshan Dosani, decided the tiptoeing was the problem. They named the thing, then built a lab to fix it.
She describes the mission in plain, almost stubborn terms: “deliver real innovation in women's vaginal and sexual health, targeting root causes with clinically backed science.” Note the words she leaves out. No mystique, no marketing fog. Root causes. Clinically backed. Real.
The dinner table was a faculty lounge. An aunt's love of medicine had rippled through the family until there were a dozen physicians in it, and the expectation pointed in one direction. Nazem started pre-med, the obvious heir to all that white-coat conviction.
Then she stepped off the track. She moved into finance and a risk-analysis desk - right before the 2008 market collapse made risk the only word anyone could think about. A personal loss redirected her again, and she went back to school, landing at the University of Pennsylvania for a post-baccalaureate in biological sciences. Along the way she had also studied Spanish language and literature, and psychology. An unusual transcript for a founder. A very useful one for someone whose actual job turned out to be translation.
Her first company was about sleep. With two partners she built a wellness venture aimed at the hours we lose to it, and learned the unglamorous craft of turning research into something a person actually wants to buy. Women's health came next, and it fit better than anything before it.
The throughline: a family fluent in medicine, a daughter fluent in everyone else. Biology to know the science, psychology to know the worry, Spanish literature to know that the right words matter. She didn't become the 13th physician. She became the person who makes the other 12 make sense.
She led development of Kindra's Soothe Bath Soak inside the company's Innovation Lab, working alongside chemists, women's health experts and OB/GYNs. The skeptics are part of the formula, not an afterthought to it.
Her conviction is that consumers can handle the science if someone bothers to explain it. Clear communication isn't the wrapper on the product - for a brand built on clinical claims, it is the product.
Kindra is run as a true co-CEO partnership with Afshan Dosani. Splitting the top job is rare in startups; here it reads as a deliberate bet that two heads beat the cult of the solo founder.
Every detour turns out to have been research. Finance taught her risk. Loss taught her urgency. Sleep taught her the craft. Women's health is where all of it finally pointed.
Starts in finance and risk analysis - just before the market turns the word “risk” into a headline.
Returns to school for a post-bac in biological sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Works in healthcare public affairs and science communication; co-founds a sleep-focused wellness company.
Kindra is founded as a science-backed women's health brand.
Kindra raises a Seed round; total funding reported around $7.9M. Nazem steps into a new role at the company.
PHE, Inc. - parent of Adam & Eve - announces a strategic partnership and minority stake in Kindra.
Strip away the category and Nazem's aspiration is almost civic: make daily intimate and vaginal care an accepted, science-backed essential, close the gaps in menopause care, and hand people enough real information to understand their own bodies.
It's a quiet kind of ambition. No moonshot language, no manifesto. Just the belief that a part of life half the population goes through deserves the same evidence, the same shelf space and the same plain speech as everything else.