The company quietly rewiring how American maternal care gets paid for - one insurance contract at a time.
Here is a fact about American maternal care that Zaya Care has organized an entire company around: the care mostly stops the moment you leave the hospital. Your OB-GYN waves goodbye, and the pelvic floor therapy, the lactation help, the postpartum mental health, the nutrition counseling - the things that European systems treat as ordinary parts of having a baby - become your problem to find, vet, and pay for out of pocket. In cash. From specialists who, more often than not, don't take insurance because taking insurance is a bureaucratic nightmare.
This is a coordination failure, not a shortage of good providers. The therapists exist. The demand exists. What's missing is the boring connective tissue - the contracts, the credentialing, the billing plumbing - that would let one talk to the other. Zaya Care's insight, and it is a genuinely contrarian one for a startup, is that the missing plumbing is the business. Not the app. Not the brand. The plumbing.
Any startup can build a directory of therapists. Very few can get them all covered by your health plan.
Founder and CEO Leoni Runge grew up inside the German healthcare system, where her sister works as an OB-GYN. She watched pregnancy get treated as a nine-plus-month, full-body event with in-home visits and specialists on tap, and then watched the American version - a sequence of appointments that ends abruptly - and asked the obvious question. Why not import the former? The catch is that you cannot simply airlift a European care model into a system built on private insurance networks. You have to negotiate your way in. So that is what Zaya did.
Figures compiled from public reporting and company statements; some are approximate and reflect the most recent available data.
Zaya negotiates and manages insurance contracts with payers - Aetna, United Healthcare, EmblemHealth, Oscar and more - on behalf of independent providers, so a solo practitioner can suddenly be in-network.
It handles credentialing, eligibility verification and claims - the administrative overhead and financial risk that keep small practices stuck in cash-only mode.
A multi-specialty roster of maternal and wellness specialists that patients can access as covered, in-network care rather than surprise out-of-pocket bills.
Higher per-visit reimbursement, new insured patient volume, and room to add specialties - the efficiency of a large system, minus the loss of independence.
Physical and occupational therapists focused on recovery and function.
Certified consultants supporting feeding in the earliest postpartum weeks.
Therapists specializing in perinatal and postpartum mental health.
Registered dietitians for preconception through postpartum nutrition.
Licensed acupuncturists treating pregnancy-related concerns.
A European-style continuum, from preconception all the way to recovery.
Zaya sits in the middle of a three-sided relationship - payers, providers, and patients - and its whole job is to make the three of them agree. Payers get a vetted, organized network instead of a chaos of individual cash-pay providers. Providers get to accept insurance without drowning in the paperwork that made them refuse insurance in the first place. Patients get care that their plan actually covers.
The value Zaya captures comes from the improved reimbursement and the administrative machinery it runs on the provider's behalf. It is not a flashy consumer app selling a monthly subscription; it is closer to infrastructure. The moat, and Zaya would happily tell you this, is not the software - it is the years of payer relationships that let it say "these specialists are in-network" and have it be true.
That framing - distribution as the product - explains why Zaya spent its early life in negotiations rather than feature sprints. In healthcare, the best care in the world is inert if patients can't afford it and providers can't get paid. Solve the getting-paid problem and a lot of downstream problems quietly dissolve.
It also explains the expansion math. Growing means replicating the in-network network state by state, payer by payer. That is slower than shipping code, but it is also much harder to copy - which is rather the point.
Growing up in the European healthcare system, I started Zaya to establish a new standard of comprehensive maternity care in the United States.
Beyond the funds, the round drew executives from Cityblock Health, Oscar Health, DispatchHealth and Headway - a roster of people who have already built healthcare distribution once. In a company betting the farm on distribution, that is not an accident.
Leoni Runge founds Zaya Care, aiming to bring European-style comprehensive maternity care to the US.
Zaya launches publicly with a mission to build the largest network of in-network maternal care specialists.
Raises a $7.6M seed round led by Inspired Capital to expand into new states and build out the platform.
Named to the New York Digital Health 100; recognized among promising women's health startups of the year.
Broadens into a multi-specialty provider network serving 100+ independent practices across New York and New Jersey.
• Built a mission around the largest US network of in-network maternal specialists.
• Negotiated coverage with Aetna, United Healthcare & EmblemHealth.
• Named to the New York Digital Health 100.
• Grew to 100+ practices across two states.
• The founder's sister is an OB-GYN in Germany - the origin of the whole European-care thesis.
• That red brushstroke on the logo sits like a diacritic - a European accent over an American company.
• Zaya's contrarian belief: the insurance contract, not the app, is the product.
• It started squarely in maternal care, then widened into wellness.
Video links point to public search results; Zaya Care does not currently maintain a dedicated public video channel.
Zaya Care is a New York-based healthcare company building the largest network of in-network maternal and wellness specialists in the United States. It negotiates insurance contracts on behalf of independent practitioners - pelvic floor therapists, lactation consultants, dietitians, mental health therapists and acupuncturists - and handles credentialing, eligibility and billing so those providers can accept insurance without the administrative burden or financial risk of doing it alone. Inspired by the comprehensive European model of maternity care, Zaya gives small practices the leverage and efficiency of a large health system while letting them stay independent, and gives patients affordable, whole-person care beyond the standard OB-GYN visit.
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