She spent years repeating one sentence in clinics and on camera. Then she built a company so the sentence could scale.
Start with what she is doing now, not where she began. Sarah Oreck co-founded and ran Mavida Health, a virtual platform that treats women through the hormonal transitions most of medicine has historically waved off - premenstrual mood disorders, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause. Not a wellness app. A clinical operation: licensed therapists, psychiatric medication management, group and couples work, all of it reachable from a couch in California, New York, New Jersey, or Texas.
In June 2026, WPS acquired the company. Oreck stayed on as co-founder, and Mavida kept running under its own leadership. The acquisition was, in plain terms, a vote on an idea she had been arguing for years: that you cannot treat a woman's mind while ignoring the chemistry it runs on.
The line she keeps coming back to is blunt. "Women's mental health is inextricably tied to their hormones, and yet for too long, that connection has been dismissed and ignored." Mavida was the rebuttal, written in clinicians and infrastructure instead of opinion pieces.
She built it with Emma Sugerman, a health-tech entrepreneur, in 2022. The division of labor told you the bet: a clinician who knew exactly what good care looked like, paired with an operator who knew how to ship it to people who could not get it. By 2023 the company had raised a seed round of roughly $1.5 million, around $3 million in total - small numbers by venture standards, large enough to put licensed care into four states.
Four states is not a slogan. It is paperwork. Every new state a telehealth psychiatry company enters means another licensing regime, another set of rules about who can prescribe what to whom across a screen. California, New York, New Jersey, Texas. Each one was a door someone had to walk through, and the walking is the unglamorous part of the story that most founders skip when they describe their mission.
The first credential on her wall is a Bachelor of Arts in the history of art, from Yale. That is not a typo and it is not a detour she hides. People who study paintings learn to look at a thing for a long time before deciding what it means - useful training for a field where the obvious diagnosis is often the wrong one.
From there the path turned deliberate. A master's in global medicine at USC. A medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Then Columbia: a psychiatry residency, followed by a fellowship in women's mental health and reproductive psychiatry - a subspecialty rare enough that most patients have never met a doctor trained in it.
Reproductive psychiatry is the study of how the body's hormonal weather - menstruation, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause - moves through the mind. Few people do it. Oreck made it the entire point.
She is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and licensed across four states. She opened a virtual private practice in 2018 and consulted for big institutions - Providence Health & Services, Cedars-Sinai. She became on-camera talent for MedCircle, the kind of clinician comfortable explaining a hard idea to a lens. The credentials were settled. The system around them was not, and that gap is what eventually became a company.
There is a quiet logic to the sequence. The art history degree taught attention. The global-medicine master's at USC widened the frame past a single patient to whole populations and the systems that fail them. Medical school and residency supplied the rigor. The fellowship handed her a specialty almost nobody else carries. Stack those, and you do not get a generalist who dabbles in women's health - you get a specialist who can argue the science, run the clinic, and explain both to a camera without losing the audience.
Most people would have stopped at any one of those rungs. A board-certified reproductive psychiatrist with a private practice and a media presence is, by any reasonable measure, a finished career. Oreck treated it as a starting position.
The problem with care for women's hormonal mental health was never that it didn't exist. It was scattered - a therapist here, a psychiatrist there, nobody talking to anybody. Mavida's move was to put it under one roof and make the roof reachable.
Licensed therapists and medication management, not generic wellness content. Care that can write a prescription and follow a patient over time.
One platform spanning premenstrual mood disorders, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause - the full hormonal arc, not a single moment.
Therapy alone, therapy in community, and couples work - because a hormonal transition rarely happens to just one person in a household.
The phrase Mavida uses for itself is "whole-person." It sounds soft until you notice what it is rejecting: the assembly line, where a woman gets passed between a therapist who does not prescribe, a prescriber who does not have time to listen, and a primary-care doctor who knows neither. Oreck's design collapses those handoffs. The same platform that helps someone through fertility treatment is still there months later for postpartum, and years later for perimenopause. Continuity is the product as much as any single session.
It also names a second target audience, the one most platforms forget: partners. By offering couples work alongside individual and group therapy, Mavida treats a hormonal transition as a household event rather than a private one. That choice is easy to overlook on a feature list and hard to overstate in a living room. It is the kind of detail you only build if you have watched, up close, how much of the weight lands on people who were never the patient.
Running one company did not stop her from shaping others. Oreck advises some of the most recognizable names in femtech - the products that show up in your feed promising to take women's bodies seriously. She has sat on the board of Maternal Mental Health Now. The pattern is consistent: where women's health meets product, her name tends to appear in the credits.
It is a particular kind of influence. Not loud. The clinician in the room who decides whether a claim is actually defensible. In a field crowded with confident marketing, that role is rarer than it should be, and it is the one she keeps being asked to play.
There is a through-line connecting the advisory seats, the board work, the on-camera explainers, and the company itself. Each is a different lever on the same problem: women's health gets talked about loudly and resourced quietly. Oreck keeps positioning herself where the talk turns into decisions - what a product can promise, what a nonprofit prioritizes, what a platform will actually pay clinicians to deliver.
On June 16, 2026, WPS announced it had acquired Mavida Health. The company described the deal as the first in a series of targeted investments meant to broaden its business beyond its core insurance operations. In other words, an insurer looked at women's and family mental health and decided it was worth owning, not just covering.
Mavida would keep operating independently with its existing leadership; WPS named Rochelle Myers, its chief growth officer, president of Mavida. Oreck stayed on as co-founder. An acquisition can be a finish line or a fuel stop. The structure here - independent operation, founder retained - reads like the second.
The deeper signal is harder to put on a term sheet. A category that medicine spent decades filing under "soft" had become something a balance sheet wanted exposure to. Oreck did not invent the demand. She made it legible, billable, and reachable - which is a more useful kind of invention.
Her first degree was in the history of art. The clinical training came later, and on purpose.
She advises the femtech brands you already follow while running her own company in the same space.
Before founding anything, she was the on-camera psychiatrist explaining clinical ideas for MedCircle.
Mavida went from launch to acquisition in roughly four years.