we are excited to announce that Malama Health has raised $9.2M in seed funding led by Acumen America, with participation from Wisdom Ventures, Capital F, and Coyote Ventures, alongside angels from the company’s pre-seed round. The round also includes federal and state grant funding, a combination that reflects something worth noting – the problem Malama is solving matters to payers, providers, and public health systems, not just to investors.
This is a milestone I am proud of. But what it means to me is simpler than the numbers: more women, in more places, will have someone at their side.
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The System Wasn’t Built for High Risk Pregnancies
Before I started Malama, I kept running into the same reality: the women who face the highest risk during pregnancy are the ones with the least support.
Maternal healthcare in the U.S. is designed around appointments. You come in, you are seen, you leave. Between those appointments, you are largely on your own. Labor and delivery nurses, stretched thin, dedicate just 6-10% of their time to direct labor support, far below the 53% that mothers expect and that research shows improved outcomes. After delivery, the drop-off is even steeper. Most pregnancy-related deaths in the United States occur after delivery. The standard postpartum follow-up is a single visit at six weeks. A window in which many of the most dangerous complications go undetected, and most women never make it to the appointment at all.
Doulas emerged as an answer to this gap, and the evidence for their impact is substantial. Continuous support from a trained birth worker through labor and into the postpartum period reduces interventions, improves outcomes, and changes the experience of becoming a mother. But access to doula support has never been equitably distributed. It has been a benefit for women who can afford it, which in the U.S. means mostly women with commercial insurance or high socioeconomic status .
Women insured by Medicaid, who represent more than 40% of all U.S. births, have largely been left out. Not because their pregnancies are less complicated or their need for support is less urgent, but because no one built the infrastructure to reach them at scale, inside the systems they actually use.
Malama is a care delivery company, and underneath that, a coordinated operating platform that connects community-based doulas, health plans, and clinical systems in a single model. Doula networks, clinical oversight, remote monitoring, and data reporting are integrated into one infrastructure that runs across Medicaid markets, standardizing referral workflows, risk escalation, and quality measurement so that payers and providers can actually deliver on their obligations to this population.
At the center of that infrastructure is an employed workforce of Doula-Care Navigators, hired, trained, and accountable to Malama’s care protocols, embedded in the communities where patients live.
They attend births, conduct home visits, and stay with women through the full postpartum year. When they identify a clinical risk signal like elevated blood pressure, symptoms of postpartum depression, or a glucose reading outside the normal range, they escalate it in real time to a clinician.
We build relationships with the clinics, health centers, and hospitals that serve Medicaid populations so our navigators can work alongside the providers women already trust. Bilingual support, accessible technology, and educational content written at a fifth-grade literacy level are not features we added later. They were requirements from day one, because the women we serve have historically been failed by systems that were not designed with them in mind.
The result is something that looks less like a digital health product and more like a care team, one that happens to be reimbursable through Medicaid and 10+ insurance providers.
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