The pelvic floor is a muscle group we ask 78 million women to manage with a squeeze and a reminder. Liv Labs made a spring you wear instead - and shipped it.
Every gym in America sells equipment for muscles you can see. Bands for glutes, springs for grips, weighted everything for arms and abs. But there is one muscle group carrying a good deal of the human body that the entire fitness industry addresses with a single instruction: squeeze, and remember to keep squeezing. That muscle is the pelvic floor, and Liv Labs decided the instruction was the problem.
The Y Combinator-backed startup (Summer 2021 batch) makes a small wearable called the Pippa Resistance Spring. It is worn internally, conforms to the body, and adds gentle resistance to ordinary movement. Walk, squat, stretch, run - and the pelvic floor works against the spring with each motion. There is no app to open, no daily Kegel count to hit, no clinic appointment to book. You wear it, you move, it trains.
The insight underneath is small and stubborn: the reason most people fail at pelvic floor exercises is not that the exercises do not work. It is that they are effortful and invisible, and effortful invisible things fall off the calendar. A Kegel has no external cue, no barbell to rack, no class to show up for. It lives entirely in memory and willpower, and both run out. Pippa's design sidesteps the willpower problem entirely by attaching the workout to something you were already going to do - move your body through the day.
Pelvic floor weakness is not rare. It arrives through athletics, childbearing, and aging - which is to say, through living an active life. An estimated 78 million American women experience it, and 31 million report worrying daily about leaking. For a condition that common, the standard toolkit has stayed remarkably thin: Kegel exercises you are supposed to do faithfully and invisibly, biofeedback apps that ask you to squeeze on cue, and pelvic floor physical therapy that works well but costs time and money most people ration.
The pelvic floor is a muscle group with no equipment. Liv Labs looked at a training category that had none and built the gear.The Liv Labs thesis
That is the gap Liv Labs stepped into. Not a better reminder app, not a cheaper therapist - a piece of physical equipment for a muscle the market treated as un-equippable. The framing matters. When an entire body system has no gear, that is not a small market. It is a missing one.
Part of why the category stayed thin is that the pelvic floor has been treated as a medical topic to raise quietly, if at all. Leaking during a run or a laugh gets managed privately, with pads and workarounds, rather than trained away. Liv Labs' move is to reframe the whole thing as fitness. Not a condition to hide, but a muscle to strengthen - the same posture you would take toward a weak grip or tight hamstrings. That reframing is as much of the product as the spring itself.
It also changes who the customer is. Liv Labs is not chasing patients so much as active women - runners, lifters, new mothers returning to exercise, women who intend to stay strong through their fifties and beyond. The problem those customers feel is not shame; it is interruption. A leak mid-workout is a reason to stop, and stopping is the enemy of any fitness habit. Pippa's promise is that you get to keep moving.
Liv Labs was founded in 2017 by two people who spent their careers making everyday consumer products feel effortless. Inventor Carly Price reimagined the pillow for Casper and holds 41 patents to her name. CEO Melody Roberts built digital service experiences that now scale globally at McDonald's and Panera. Together, before Liv Labs, the two worked on consumer goods for brands including Kellogg's, OXO, and Duracell.
The pairing is deliberate. Price's patents are in physical objects - things you hold, sit on, sleep against - and the pelvic floor problem is fundamentally mechanical. It needs resistance, geometry, materials that conform. Roberts brings the other half: making a product people will actually adopt and keep using, the discipline of turning a clever object into a habit. One partner knows how to build the thing; the other knows how to make it fit into a life. For an intimate device, both halves are load-bearing.
That background shows up in the product's central bet: convenience is not a nice-to-have in health, it is the whole game. A device abandoned by Tuesday helps no one. As Roberts frames it, Pippa "provides an immediate boost to fitness with each use" and "fits into a user's existing lifestyle, maximizing convenience." Design for the tired, not the disciplined.
Pippa provides an immediate boost to fitness with each use and fits into a user's existing lifestyle, maximizing convenience.Melody Roberts, Cofounder & CEO
Most of FemTech is software - trackers, reminders, biofeedback dashboards. Liv Labs went the other direction and built hardware for a muscle. The distinction is not academic. An app requires you to stop your day, open it, and perform. Pippa piggybacks on movement you were already doing. The table below sketches the difference in kind.
| Approach | What you do | Requires daily effort | Where it happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pippa by Liv Labs | Wear it and move | No (passive) | Anywhere you exercise |
| Kegel training apps | Squeeze on cue | Yes | Wherever you open the app |
| Manual Kegels | Remember & repeat | Yes | On your own recall |
| Clinical pelvic floor PT | Attend sessions | Yes | A clinic, by appointment |
Liv Labs sells Pippa direct-to-consumer through its own storefront, starting at $149, and pairs the device with semi-automated self-care coaching. It also shows up in person - a vendor table at races like the Publix Atlanta Marathon - which is a smart move for an intimate product. The internet gets you scale, but a folding table at a finish line gets you trust.
The funding story is its own lesson. Rather than lean solely on venture capital, Liv Labs funded much of Pippa's development with non-dilutive SBIR grants from the NIH, the NSF, and the State of Illinois - money awarded on the strength of effectiveness data and user feedback. For a founder building something people put inside their bodies, that is a meaningful signal: the product earned research dollars before it needed a growth round.
There is a strategic elegance to it. Grant funding is patient in a way equity rarely is; it does not demand a hockey-stick chart next quarter. That patience is exactly what a body-worn medical-adjacent device needs while it accumulates the evidence to be trusted. It also flips the usual pitch order. Instead of selling a vision to investors and backfilling proof, Liv Labs built the proof first and let it do the arguing. For anyone working in an unglamorous or hard-to-explain category, that sequence is worth stealing: data can be a better first pitch deck than a deck.
The direct-to-consumer model carries its own demands. Pippa competes for attention against slicker, app-based FemTech that spends freely on acquisition, and it has to overcome a conversation many customers are not used to having out loud. That is part of why the in-person presence matters and why the coaching layer exists - both are ways to build confidence around a product that asks for a degree of intimacy most purchases do not.
From a provisional patent in 2017 to first shipments in October 2025 is eight years. In a startup culture that prizes shipping in a weekend, that timeline reads as patience rather than delay. Hardware worn inside the body moves at the speed of testing and trust, and Liv Labs used the time to gather the kind of data that grant committees and, eventually, customers want to see. Along the way, Pippa was named a Fast Company 2025 Innovation by Design honoree - recognition that leans on a quiet design philosophy: the best health products disappear into a life already in motion.
Where Liv Labs fits in the market is still being written. FemTech is crowded with apps and tracking; hardware for the pelvic floor that activates through movement, rather than through a screen or a squeeze, is a narrower lane. Whether 78 million women is a total addressable market or an aspiration depends on adoption that has only just begun. But the company has done the hard first thing: it named a real problem, built a physical answer, and put it in boxes that shipped.
The competitive edge, if it holds, will not be a single patent so much as a category position. If pelvic floor fitness becomes a normal part of how active women train - filed next to core work and mobility rather than tucked into a medical drawer - then being the brand that made the first real equipment is a durable place to stand. Apps can be cloned in a sprint. A trusted physical product with clinical-grade evidence behind it, sold to a customer who is by definition selective about what goes inside her body, is harder to copy quickly.
There are real open questions. Adoption of an internal wearable asks more of a first-time buyer than downloading an app, and the education needed to get someone comfortable is expensive to deliver at scale. Reimbursement and clinical partnerships, if Liv Labs pursues them, would widen the funnel but add regulatory weight. For now the company is doing the unglamorous work of a hardware startup one year past first shipment: getting product into hands, gathering the next round of feedback, and turning a strong idea into a habit people keep. The pitch is refreshingly literal. It is exercise equipment for a muscle that never had any.