She trained to mediate international conflict. She ended up reading customer data in Sao Paulo - and built a company on the difference between solving problems and preventing them.
Roberta Sotomaior runs Bloom Care, and the strange thing about Bloom Care is that most of the people it serves never bought it. Their employer did. The product arrives as a line on a benefits menu - the same place you find the dental plan and the gym discount - and from there it follows people through the long, unglamorous middle of adult life: planning a family, expecting a child, going back to work, raising kids while holding down a career.
That is the business Sotomaior built: a digital platform for women's and family health, sold to employers and insurers, delivered to their people. In Brazil it now sits behind more than 600 corporate and insurance partners, names that range from Natura and Sanofi to SulAmerica and Porto Seguro. Bloom describes itself as the country's largest virtual clinic for women and families. The pitch to a CFO is blunt: healthier, better-supported employees who stick around.
What makes the founder worth a second look is not the cap table. It is the resume that came before it. Sotomaior did not train in medicine, code, or venture capital. She trained to stop wars.
Tudo comeca na crianca e na familia.
Before the startup, there was a different ambition. Sotomaior studied diplomacy and went to Boston, where she spent roughly six years on international relations and bent her attention toward the Israel-Palestine conflict. She worked as a graduate researcher at the World Peace Foundation and spent time with the Abraham Path Initiative. The plan was a life spent at the table where adversaries argue.
Then she watched the youngest people in those zones, and the logic of her career flipped. As she has put it, she fell into the subject and fell for it, and came out the other side convinced of one thing: everything starts with the child and the family. Reacting to grown conflicts, she decided, was working too late in the story. Prevention was the better job.
So she swapped a reactive vocation for a preventive one, came back to Brazil, and in 2018 co-founded Bloom Care with Bianca Cassarino, who arrived with a long run in finance through Goldman Sachs, and Antonia Brandao Teixeira, who came from Novartis and Havas. The first version was modest: content about motherhood, funded by an angel round.
The early company sold words. Articles, guidance, a friendly voice on the internet. Useful, but Sotomaior found the ceiling fast. A six-month Facebook acceleration program pushed her toward something she has talked about more than the product itself: the discipline of reading her own data. "It was a great laboratory," she said of that stretch - the place where Bloom learned to treat user behavior as the map.
The map pointed somewhere specific. In 2019 the company signed Natura as its first big client and followed roughly 15,000 of its people for seven months. The lesson was almost embarrassingly simple. Content mattered, but at some point, she realized, you have to let people actually talk to someone. So Bloom rebuilt itself around real consultations, and the corporate-benefit model - sold to the employer, used by the employee - became the spine of the business.
It is, by design, a wide tent. Bloom built for same-sex couples and solo parents, not as an afterthought but as a selling point. "It has to be inclusive," Sotomaior has said, "which sparks a lot of interest from the companies that hire us - and the care has to be personalized." HR departments, it turns out, like buying things that cover everyone.
Mergulhei nesse assunto e me apaixonei. Tudo comeca na crianca e na familia.
Foi um grande laboratorio.
O conteudo era muito importante, mas era preciso em algum momento falar com alguem.
Precisa ser inclusivo... e o cuidado precisa ser personalizado.
At the end of 2021 Bloom Care closed a R$3 million pre-seed round, led by The Next Company and IKJ Capital. The angel list reads like a who's-who of people who run the companies Bloom wants as clients: Rachel Horta of Hekima, Renato Carvalho, president of Novartis, Marco Crespo, a former CEO of Gympass, and Fernando Okumura of KMR Ventures.
Then came the part founders rarely say out loud and Sotomaior said anyway: she went looking for the next round. By 2022 the plan was a Series A, the money earmarked for technology, data, and the commercial teams that turn a good benefit into a sold one.
Recognition followed the money. Bloom landed on a CB Insights roundup of promising digital health startups - and, as Sotomaior likes to note, it was the only one on the list founded entirely by women.
A sample of the corporate and insurance partners Bloom Care counts among its 600+ network:
In May 2023, at Web Summit Rio, Sotomaior took a seat on a panel about what it takes to build a business in Latin America. The lineup was a study in contrasts - the chief executive of OnlyFans, the founder of Oya Care, partners from Canary VC and IKJ Capital, and her. Different businesses, wildly different headlines, one shared market and one shared problem: how do you build something durable in a region that rewards the stubborn?
It is a fitting venue for someone whose whole pitch is the long game. Bloom is not built for the dramatic moment. It is built for the seven-month follow-up, the quiet check-in, the benefit that nobody chose but plenty of people end up grateful for.
The goal: make continuous, personalized, inclusive support a standard line on every benefits menu in Latin America - and grow Bloom Care into a Series A leader.
Profile compiled from public sources. Facts verified where possible; uncertain details omitted.