She sold artisanal tahini from a stall in Chelsea Market. Now she runs a $21M company - and shares the CEO chair on purpose.
// Monica Molenaar. Second acts are the best ones.
Most founders chase the shiny category. Monica Molenaar went the other way - twice. First she bet on sesame, opening a halva and tahini counter in New York's Chelsea Market when artisanal sesame was nobody's idea of a venture darling. Then, in 2020, she co-founded Alloy Health, a direct-to-consumer company built around women's midlife care, a corner of the market that the industry had spent decades politely ignoring.
Today she is co-founder and co-CEO of Alloy, which has raised $21.3 million in total funding and serves more than 70,000 customers. In November 2024 the company closed a $16 million Series A. In early 2026, Inc. Magazine named Molenaar and her co-founder to its Female Founders 500. The throughline across every venture is the same: find the thing people aren't building, and build it well.
She runs the company alongside Anne Fulenwider, the former editor-in-chief of Marie Claire. Two founders, one title, shared at the top - an arrangement that sounds like a recipe for deadlock and instead became the company's operating advantage.
"There's always something to solve."- Monica Molenaar, on why she keeps building
The resume reads like two different people. Brown University, where she studied European History and Urban Studies. Then Stanford's Graduate School of Business, MBA, class of 2003. The kind of credentials that point toward consulting decks and corner offices.
Instead she co-founded Seed + Mill with two partners, Rachel Simons and Lisa Mendelson, turning sesame into a small empire of tahini, halva, and za'atar anchored at a counter in Chelsea Market. It was bootstrapped, hands-on, and unfashionable. It was also a full course in what it takes to make something people actually want - sourcing, retail, wholesale, the daily grind of a physical product.
That apprenticeship matters. When she later built a digital health company, she wasn't a first-timer reading a playbook. She had already shipped a product, met a payroll, and learned the difference between a clever idea and a business that holds together.
Shared leadership is the kind of thing investors warn you about. Molenaar made it the point. She compares running Alloy to an orchestra - or an elite team sport - where the job is less about being the loudest voice and more about getting everyone playing in time.
Her management credo is disarmingly plain: "Give people the opportunity to shine." It's the rare leadership line that survives contact with an actual org chart.
"Being an entrepreneur has enabled me to be really creative. There's always something to solve."
"We have figured out a model where nothing that we do is at the expense of anyone else."
"I view what we are doing almost like an elite team sport or an orchestra."
"Give people the opportunity to shine."
Molenaar's ambition is set on a decade-or-two horizon: a world where the knowledge gaps, dismissal, and access barriers women face in midlife simply stop being the default. It's a goal measured less in valuation than in how ordinary good care becomes.
That patience is the tell. A founder optimizing for the next quarter doesn't bother with a twenty-year target. She's building the company she wishes had existed when she went looking and found nothing.