#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Noelle Acosta, Founder & CEO, Noula Health
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Providing Reproductive Health Tailored to Individual Biology
Noula Health is a data-driven virtual care platform offering personalized, accessible health care through at-home hormone testing and one-on-one coaching from experts. Noula helps its customers craft reproductive health care plans tailored to their individual needs with science-backed recommendations determined from a quick finger prick test and ongoing assessments. Founder & CEO Noelle Acosta, motivated by her own health care journey, shared with us her story, her unique experiences raising capital, and the future outlook of her company.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create Noula Health?
I wanted to create a platform to empower women and birthing people to better understand and take care of their bodies through proactive, personalized reproductive health care while also being inclusive of different cultural backgrounds. I'm half Mexican, so supporting Latinos and Latinx folks was especially important to me while creating Noula Health, which will also be launching in Spanish.
The idea behind Noula stems from a brush I had with a chronic reproductive health condition. Despite having great employer-sponsored health insurance, I was largely ignored in the doctor's office and prescribed birth control as a remedy while my pain was dismissed. I was incredibly frustrated and had many questions that stemmed from my lack of care. Is this the way my body is supposed to be? Why doesn't my doctor care? So I sought out to build a better system for reproductive health care.
What does the typical user experience with Noula Health look like?
When creating a Noula account, customers answer a series of onboarding questions that give us information about their health background. We then provide a personalized care plan and match them with a dedicated Noula Care Coach, who are all licensed professionals. Our customers then have the option to purchase a subscription, where they receive an at-home finger prick test kit that measures nine key biomarkers. Once the test results come in, our algorithm makes recommendations based on the biomarkers.
We are not intended for diagnostic use, so we do not replace the advice or care of a physician. The majority of the content on our site was built in partnership with a diverse set of experts, and every recommendation we provide comes with a link to the resources and studies that support it, including organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). We have those resources along with a full time nurse, OBGYN, and a handful of advisors including three other OBGYNs, a reproductive psychologist, and a certified nurse midwife. Ultimately, we aim to arm people with the information they need to feel supported and advocated for outside of the clinic.
In what ways does Noula Health evolve and grow in the complex and regulation-heavy healthcare industry?
We can give preliminary insights into someone’s baseline health, but we can’t diagnose conditions such as infertility or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), per se. The labs that we work with are all CLIA & CAP certified. It’s important to us that we’re preserving the credibility and integrity of the data our customers provide us with, while also adhering to current regulations.
When it comes to new laws around reproductive health, though we do not provide information on fertility, we’re definitely concerned with what it would mean for states to potentially limit how women and birthing people can be informed about their bodies. That's part of the reason why as we grow, we’re thinking about how to deliver hybrid care where we have support from clinicians as well.
How have you been able to build your user base?
Our organic growth has been a testament to how relatable this problem is, despite no two health journeys looking alike. All of our growth is user-generated word of mouth from people looking for information about how to better take care of their bodies. And as we grow, we will be investing in online ads to reach users who may be looking online for that information.
Something that's always top of mind for us is how we're going to use the voice of our customer as the lighthouse that steers our product roadmap. Some folks have specifically requested a Noula doctor to speak with, and though we can’t provide that yet, it’s an exciting problem to have, and we’d definitely like to get to that point someday.
What was your experience raising capital for Noula Health?
I’m a brown, female, solo founder in a heavily male dominated industry, so my experience raising capital was very hard. Most of the feedback I got from male investors after pitching ran along the lines of “let me ask my wife if she would use this service,” which told me that they didn’t truly grasp the problem we were trying to solve. Additionally, cultural competency and inclusion are at the root of our care delivery model, and we would often get written off with the assumption that our service is only for people of color, which isn’t the case. Talking to other female founders and founders of color who face the same struggles has been the most helpful in terms of support in this area. I am one of fewer than 100 Latina women to have raised a million dollars from venture capital, so I recognize that the odds are heavily stacked against us. Rather than go it alone, I looked for other resilient and passionate people to lean on. In the company’s early days, I was a part of an accelerator called Visible Hands, which invests in underrepresented founders. That really helped kickstart our initial fundraising journey and put me in a position where I could leave my full-time job to build Noula.
What are your goals for Noula Health moving forward?
We’re going to fundraise again soon so that we can continue to build out our product and care delivery model. Changing the narrative to make preventative care the bedrock of all health care is something that will always be top of mind for us. Ultimately, we’re working towards a world where inclusive, comprehensive reproductive health care is standard and companies like Noula don't need to exist.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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