Kate Ryder

Company: Maven Clinic
Title: Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Industry: Health care
Hometown: Redding, Connecticut
Notable in 2023: Scaled Maven's menopause program, which provides education and care and fills a major gap in current models.

In 2014, digital health was still a relatively new concept and a digital-first focus on women's health was barely on the market's radar. But as an early-stage investor at venture capital firm Index Ventures, Kate Ryder saw a gap to fill. Her awareness led to the launch of Maven Clinic, which as founder and CEO, Ryder has grown to become the largest virtual clinic for women's and family health, with 17 million lives under management.

Maven is a go-to digital health partner for many top companies, with more than 2,000 employer partners including half of the Fortune 15 – Amazon, Microsoft and AT&T, among them, and has deals with four of the largest national insurance providers. 

In 2023, Maven expanded internationally, partnering with Amazon to provide family benefits to employees in 50-plus countries, and acquired London-based Naytal in March. In all, Maven now serves members in more than 175 countries.

The scope of the challenge and market opportunity that Ryder and her team have focused on since Maven's founding is in the data: women's health in the U.S., specifically, is typified by inequities and serious issues in access and outcomes. Roughly half of U.S. counties are without a single OB-GYN, and the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world.

The need to provide better women's and family health has attracted many corporations across sectors of the economy to Maven, including SoFi, L'Oreal, Snap, Snowflake, Bumble and Boston Scientific. 

While the startup first became most widely known for reproductive benefits, and saw a boom in business after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning the federal right to abortion, it has continued to fill in key gaps in women's health, launching its menopause program in late 2022, providing virtual access to specialists and education. Nearly 300 of its clients offer the program.

Maven has been named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list for two consecutive years.

Ryder told CNBC in August that the Amazon deal was further proof of an underlying business premise that has continued room for growth alongside the world's biggest firms. ″When you take care of women and families, not only do you have a better healthcare system in all of these countries but you have a better company," she said.

Maven is now one of the rare female-led unicorns, valued at over $1 billion by investors, and Ryder is paying that forward in the VC world, continuing to serve as an early-stage investor for female-founded health-care companies.