Tara Raffi

A booking error became a business plan

Today Tara Raffi runs Almond ObGyn, a women's health practice that opened its first clinic in Los Angeles and sells care the way modern companies sell everything else: fast, transparent, designed to be used. She is the founder and CEO. Her co-founder, Carly Allen, runs the brand. Together they pitch a simple, slightly cheeky idea - that the gynecologist's office should feel less like the DMV and more like self-care.

The origin is unglamorous, which is the point. Raffi was a management consultant who spent her days helping enormous hospital systems save money. Then she tried to be a patient. She needed an ObGyn for a chronic issue after moving to the Bay Area, and the process fell apart in the small, infuriating ways that healthcare tends to: a booking miscommunication here, a month-long wait there, a waiting room she clocked at nine times longer than the actual appointment. She would leave confused, then open Google to figure out what her own doctor had meant.

Most people grumble and reschedule. Raffi, who had literally been paid to study hospital operations, recognized a system failure when she sat inside one. The same inefficiency she diagrammed on slides for clients was now wasting her own afternoon. That gap - between what she knew about the back office and what she felt in the exam room - is where Almond came from.

One Medical, but for women

Almond's thesis is operational, not magical. The problem, Raffi argues, is that ObGyn time is used badly: doctors get buried in tasks that don't require a doctor, so patients wait longer and still leave with unanswered questions. Almond's answer is to build software that takes busywork off physicians' plates and to hire a wider range of care providers, not just doctors. Free up the clinician, and care gets faster and more thorough at the same time. The shorthand she uses is blunt and effective - it's like One Medical, but for women's health.

The market math is large enough to make investors lean in. There are roughly 130 million women in the U.S. who need ObGyn care every year, and the country spends around $200 billion on it annually - the second-largest medical specialty by spend, behind only primary care. Billions have flowed into modernizing primary care. Women, Raffi points out, were still waiting for their version. Almond's traction arrived early: before the first clinic even opened its doors, the company was running at a $90,000 monthly rate and booking three weeks out.

In late 2022, fresh out of Y Combinator's Summer batch, Almond raised a $7 million seed round led by True Ventures. Membership starts modestly, major insurers are accepted, and out-of-pocket options exist for the uninsured. The launch tagline told you everything about the brand's refusal to be clinical and dull: "Elevated care for down there."

She built a $50M fund before she built a clinic

Raffi did not arrive in healthcare by accident. At McKinsey she served large U.S. hospital systems and built patient-recommendation tools for insurers, learning the machinery of American medicine from the inside. She left to join Factual, a location-data company, as an early operations and marketing hire around its Series A - a crash course in startup velocity. Then she went back to McKinsey to do something unusual for a consultancy: she became founding manager of its internal tech incubator, growing the fund to roughly $50 million invested globally and helping fund well over a hundred early-stage software products.

It is a strange and useful resume for a healthcare founder - one part hospital insider, one part operator, one part venture builder. She watched companies get funded for a living, then put herself on the other side of the table. Her parents seem to have set the table early: her father is a business professor who mentored her, and her mother studied computer science and became a software-company executive. Business and engineering, at the dinner table.

Not neutral on the politics

Raffi launched Almond into a particular moment, and she has not pretended otherwise. She has been direct about reproductive rights, framing the company as part of a larger argument about who gets to make decisions over their own bodies. The conviction is not a marketing layer bolted onto the business - it is the reason she thinks women's healthcare deserved its own company in the first place. Her line is that women have unique needs and deserve solutions designed for them specifically, not hand-me-downs from systems built around someone else.

For all the seriousness, Raffi keeps a sense of humor about herself. In an early mentorship meeting with a Stanford ObGyn, she sat through the entire 40-minute conversation without realizing she had her AirPods in the whole time. She laughed it off as the most tech-entrepreneur thing imaginable, and filed it under a lesson she repeats: don't take yourself too seriously. It is a good companion rule to the two words she names as her favorite piece of advice - "always ask" - on the theory that you'd be astounded how far asking will get you.

A consultant and a brand-builder walk into a clinic

Raffi did not do this alone, and the choice of partner is telling. Carly Allen, Almond's co-founder and chief brand officer, spent her career in CAA's marketing division, where she was head of production on global campaigns for Coca-Cola, Nike, Marriott, Chipotle and Bonobos. Allen's late father was an ObGyn, which gives the brand a personal thread that no focus group could manufacture. The pairing is deliberate: Raffi brings the operational rigor and the hospital fluency, Allen brings the conviction that a women's health company should feel like a brand people actually want to belong to. In a category long defined by fluorescent lighting and paper gowns, that is closer to a strategy than a luxury.

The brand voice shows up everywhere, from the cheeky launch copy to the insistence that getting care should itself feel like a self-care experience - offices and software designed to be convenient, reliable and intuitive. The model is membership plus insurance: a modest annual fee, major insurers accepted, and an out-of-pocket path for the uninsured. Raffi counts Carbon Health founder Caesar Djavaherian among the mentors who shaped her thinking, and she has been candid about the grind of getting into Y Combinator and raising capital in a category investors had historically underweighted.

She is also wary of the easy version of disruption - the kind that strips the human touch out of medicine in the name of efficiency. She points to the struggles of heavily automated clinics as a caution: technology should give clinicians back their time, not replace the relationship at the center of care. That is the needle Almond is trying to thread - more software in the back office, more humanity in the room.

In 2024, Forbes profiled Almond as the first full-service, tech-enabled OB-GYN in the country, and Inc. put Raffi and Allen on its Female Founders 250 list. Raffi's ambition runs past the clinic walls. She talks about wanting more women in positions of power - in startups, yes, but also in government and even conflict zones - on the belief that women understand community and shared humanity in ways leadership badly needs. For now, the mission is narrower and harder: make excellent women's healthcare the default, one appointment that actually starts on time at a stretch.