Willow Innovations

The mechanical breast pump was patented in 1854, and for the next century and a half the design brief was, more or less, "add a motor." You get suction, you get tubes, you get bottles that hang off the body, and you get a cord that ends at an electrical outlet. The whole apparatus assumes the user will sit still, in a private room, doing nothing else. Which is a strange assumption to make about a person who has just added a newborn to their life and, frequently, still has a job.

Willow Innovations was founded in 2014 to disagree with that assumption. The company came out of ExploraMed, the medical-device incubator run by Dr. Josh Makower, a serial inventor whose day job is essentially "notice a category everyone has stopped questioning, then question it." Makower is Willow's founder and chairman; John Chang, the co-founder and chief technical officer, ran the engineering. With design help from IDEO, they set out to build something the industry had treated as roughly impossible: a pump that lived entirely inside the bra, with no cords, no tubes, and no bottle swinging in the breeze.

In 2017 they shipped it. TIME put it on the list of the 25 Best Inventions of the year, which is the kind of validation that is nice for a press release and, more importantly, signals that a jury of non-parents grasped the point. The point is not that the machine is clever - though it is - but that it removes a constraint. A wearable pump does not ask the user to stop being a person for twenty minutes. You can pump and answer email, pump and drive, pump and stand in a meeting wearing a slightly bulkier sweater than usual. This is a small thing and an enormous thing at the same time.

There is a version of this business that is just a gadget - a neat trick, a premium accessory, a thing you see at a trade show and forget. Willow is not that, and the reason is a number. Since the wearable pump became available in 2017, the category it created grew to represent roughly 57% of the entire US breast pump market. When you invent a product category and then that category eats more than half of the incumbent market in under a decade, you have not made a gadget. You have made a market, and then taken most of it.

The origin story is engineering: Makower's incubator, Chang's technology, IDEO's industrial design. The current chapter is arguably more interesting, because it belongs to Sarah O'Leary, who became CEO in January 2024. O'Leary did not arrive as a career device executive. She started in consulting, moved into brand and growth in e-commerce and retail, had her first child in 2018, and spent a year trying to pump and breastfeed while working - which is to say she was a member of Willow's target market before she was its chief executive. A recruiter brought her to the company in 2019. She ran growth, then marketing, then commercial, then the whole thing.

There is a tidy lesson in this, and it happens to be true: the person who lived the problem tends to make better decisions about the product than the person who studied it. O'Leary has been explicit that Willow is "a team built of women innovating for women," and positions it as the only leading US-founded pump brand with that particular claim. Whether that is a durable moat or a marketing line is the sort of thing reasonable people argue about. What is not arguable is that a company selling a product used exclusively by mothers is probably better off being run by someone who has stood in the locked office at lunch, wires everywhere, trying to make it work.

The cap table is a who's-who of health investors: NEA and Meritech Capital Partners as long-term backers, with Lightstone Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, and Endeavour Vision joining along the way. The interesting thing about that list is not the names but what their checks imply. For a long time, "women's health" was treated by venture capital as a niche - a polite way of saying "small." Willow raising nine figures to solve a problem that roughly half the population is routinely told to just tough out is evidence that the niche framing was always wrong. Capital follows conviction, and the conviction here is that the old status quo was never actually acceptable, merely unquestioned.