Maayan Cohen

On October 7, 2023, Maayan Cohen was somewhere over the Atlantic, mid-flight from Tel Aviv to Las Vegas, when Hamas attacked Israel. She landed, delivered her scheduled conference speech, and flew back the next morning. She then ran Hello Heart - a 420-person company with offices in Menlo Park and Tel Aviv - from bomb shelters, while organizing housing for employees and opening an aid center at the office for reservists. Approximately 10% of the Tel Aviv team was called up for military service. Both Israeli and Palestinian staff received support.

CNBC put her on its inaugural 2024 Changemakers list - 50 women who are transforming business. She was listed alongside Taylor Swift and Alex Cooper. Her response to that level of attention is consistent with her LinkedIn bio, which is one word: Empathy.

Cohen co-founded Hello Heart in 2013 with a specific bet: that cardiovascular disease - the number one killer globally - was also the most tractable digital health opportunity that nobody was treating with the seriousness it deserved. Over a decade later, Hello Heart covers more than 1.6 million members through Fortune 500 employer benefit programs, with clinical outcomes validated by researchers at Harvard and UCLA.

Cohen grew up in Israel and studied biotechnology at Tel Aviv University - a degree that wired her to think about biological systems and evidence before reaching for claims. After graduating, she served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a tank and mortar platoon sergeant, commanding an all-male team. The military, she has said, is where she learned to lead through complexity rather than around it.

From there she moved into management consulting, eventually running the Consumer Goods and Retail practice at a leading firm. She managed new-product launch campaigns for Hyundai, Nestle, and American Express - brand-level strategy for companies that measure success in millions of transactions. She got good at reading customer behavior, at understanding why people do and don't change habits.

That fluency in behavioral science turned out to be the keystone of everything Hello Heart would become. The insight was not that software could track blood pressure. It was that software could change the behavior around it.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Hello Heart's competitive position is structural: it is the only digital therapeutics company focused exclusively on heart disease. While competitors built horizontal wellness platforms, Cohen built vertically - deep into cardiovascular, deep into the science, deep into outcomes data.

The platform gives members an FDA-cleared Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure monitor that syncs to a mobile app. The app provides AI-driven coaching, medication reminders, cholesterol tracking, irregular heartbeat detection, and lab result imports. Clinicians get structured reports. Employers get aggregate cost data. The loop is closed.

The numbers are peer-reviewed. A study conducted by researchers at Harvard and UCLA, published in Health Information Science and Systems, found that Hello Heart members showed 57% blood pressure normalization at four weeks, rising to 69% at 22 weeks. At 12 months, the average improvement in systolic blood pressure was 24 mmHg. That kind of outcome sits well inside the range of clinical interventions - from a mobile app that someone downloaded voluntarily.

Hello Heart's go-to-market is entirely B2B. Employers purchase it as a benefit, then employees enroll. Fortune 500 clients include CVS and Delta Air Lines. The value proposition to HR leaders is straightforward: lower medical costs from fewer heart attacks, strokes, and hospital readmissions. The 2025 announcement of a performance guarantee - where Hello Heart commits to demonstrable cost savings or clients get money back - signals how confident the company is in its data.

The Series D in April 2022 was the signal round - $70 million led by Stripes, with IVP, Resolute, and BlueRun participating. It came at a time when digital health valuations were contracting across the board. Hello Heart raised on growth: 100% revenue increase year-over-year and a client roster that kept expanding into large self-insured employers.

Cohen's investor list is not accidental. Khosla Ventures brought deep healthtech credibility. Google's participation signaled data infrastructure validation. IVP's continued involvement across Series C and D reflects the kind of investor conviction that comes from watching revenue metrics move.

The CNN Business profile from November 2023 is one of the more unusual CEO portraits of recent years. Cohen described managing the company while her 5-year-old son's kindergarten was shut down, while employees were deploying to military reserves, and while coordinating humanitarian aid from an office that had been converted into a supply center.

"It all feels like a nightmare," she told CNN. That quote landed in media because it was honest in a way corporate crisis statements rarely are. Cohen did not issue a measured holding statement. She ran operations, kept clients informed, supported a workforce split across two countries in very different states of danger, and continued to build the product.

What stands out about her response is the scope. It was not limited to Israeli employees. Palestinian staff in Hello Heart's orbit also received support - a decision that reflects the kind of values-first operating model she credits for Hello Heart's culture. The Masters of Scale Rapid Response series featured her account of those weeks because the leadership calculus - hold the company together while managing an active war zone - was genuinely instructive.