Maven opens our doors to women and families everywhere

Product launches come with a point of view. Something is not right in the world, and so here is a new way forward. 

Today we're excited to announce that Maven is returning to our roots and launching our direct-to-consumer platform, opening our doors to everyone. 

Eleven years ago, when I first launched Maven, women's health felt strangely quiet. 

Entire categories of care were missing from the system. Providers doing extraordinary work — doulas, midwives, maternal mental health providers — were rarely integrated into traditional healthcare. And while healthcare is often described as "local," for large portions of the country, women's health expertise wasn't accessible locally at all. Our point of view was simple: a woman's best shot at getting the healthcare she deserved was a direct line to the right provider. 

So we built a virtual clinic, with 15+ types of women's health providers, and brought it to consumers. Wherever you lived, whatever your plan covered — you would have access to someone who looked like you, spoke your language, and could actually help. 

The vision made sense, but we were wrong about one thing. Direct-to-consumer wasn't the right path. We were too early. It was pre-COVID, and coverage for virtual care was nearly non-existent. Time spent in city parks trying to convince passersby to engage digitally with practitioners left no doubt — the market wasn’t ready. 

Instead, we spent the last decade partnering with employers and health plans to get our product into the hands of as many people as possible. We took our virtual clinic and built structured, high-risk programs and integrated benefits on top of it, taking financial risk against fertility and maternity outcomes, to both provide better care and lower costs. 

Working from within the system required a level of clinical rigor that is easy to take for granted in a more consumer health market. This constraint turned out to be a gift. It pushed us not just to understand engagement, but also to know what drives outcomes. 

It sharpened something we’ve always believed: women's health has never been a single condition in isolation. Hormones affect metabolism. Metabolic health affects fertility. Pregnancy affects cardiovascular health. Mental health intersects with all of it. And in a brick- and-mortar system that asks women to piece together these relationships on their own, core insights are commonly missed. 

Again and again, we've seen it: When women have access to the right providers working together, care improves. Misdiagnoses have been corrected. Missed signals are caught earlier. Patients finally get answers after years of confusion. 

As we've grown, our category has grown alongside us. Women's health has become much less quiet. Direct-to-consumer prescription platforms, wearables, diagnostics, and AI tools together mean a woman, in 2026, might use one product for hormone advice, another for weight management, another for therapy, another for fertility support. Some may be sponsored by her employer or health plan; others aren’t. Each offers useful information. None truly connects the dots across the systems in her body — or across the stages of her life. 

Progress has brought tools, but it hasn't brought coherence. 

At Maven, we intend to close this gap. Focusing increased attention on the healthcare consumer, at Maven, is very much a return to our roots. It’s also an evolution that feels profoundly natural, given the current needs of the market. 

Why is now the right time? Three reasons:

1. The need for clinical coherence has never been greater. More point solutions create more noise and more confusion about where to go and who to trust.  Stitching together online and offline care requires deeply thoughtful care models, supported by responsible AI, straddling both enterprise and direct-to-consumer channels — and very few companies are built to do that.  

2. Consumer health demand is overwhelmingly female. Women drive the majority of health-related search and AI queries. Women make the majority of healthcare decisions for their families. Women represent the majority of wearables users and GLP-1 users. Virtual menopause care has emerged as a major category on its own. And yet the system still isn't built around them.  

3. Our employer and health plan partners are asking for coherent and complete solutions that meet broader consumer needs. They want more comprehensive women's health — across metabolic, cardiovascular, and menstrual care — and they want their employees to be able to find it easily and use it. Impact, ROI, and breadth are the cornerstone of what they want from their women's and family health offerings. 

Our vision is big, but we're initially focusing on access to our network, and the two areas where we believe coherent care is most urgently required: hormone health and GLP-1 care for women. These areas sit at the center of women's health. 

First, we're opening up our network to everyone, and working over the coming months and years to get as many providers in-network as possible. We have exceptional providers across over 30+ types of specialties — women's health providers who really get in there with you to navigate a tough fertility journey, or undiagnosed endometriosis, or postpartum depression. Providers who are menopause-trained. Providers who come from many different backgrounds, races, religions, genders, and sexual orientations, so you can receive care from people who share your experience. In an age of AI, accessible, affordable, compassionate, trustworthy care still remains one of the most profound unmet needs in women's health.

We're starting with the basics. We've worked long enough in healthcare to know that systems around billing, scheduling, prior authorization, coverage, customer service, and pharmacy are no walk in the park. There are few shortcuts, and we will invest outsized resources here first. 

Hormone health is one of our first specialty products. 

Hormones shape nearly every system in a woman's body: metabolism, bone health, cardiovascular health, mood, fertility, sleep, and aging. Yet hormone health remains one of the most under-researched and inconsistently treated areas in medicine. 

We prescribe hormones throughout our platform already. But over the last 18 months, as consumer health ads have overtaken social media, we've watched hormones get marketed as a panacea without the necessary rigor to personalize hormone care in the way that is most likely to help. 

Take, for instance, a 41-year-old experiencing mild perimenopause symptoms with regular cycles. She might be better served by not taking HRT, but rather one of the hormonal birth control methods — which is what The Menopause Society would recommend. Birth control can deliver estrogen and a progestin in ways that stabilize symptoms earlier in the perimenopause transition and support long-term bone health. But as HRT ads have multiplied, this type of clinical nuance has faded to the background. Or take someone in their 30s with either painful or heavy periods, irregular cycles, which is common in 20-30% of women. A careful history and hormone testing are critical to understand potential underlying drivers  — whether that's anovulation, thyroid issues, PCOS, endometriosis, or something else. 

There are many different types of hormone products with different doses and delivery systems to support the full arc of reproductive health from contraception to perimenopause through postmenopausal care. Individualized and personalized care is the only way to do it. 

Second, we are launching a subscription-based GLP-1 care model built specifically for women. 

GLP-1 protocols have been similarly complicated by a profusion of one-size-fits-all marketing. At Maven, we believe that GLP-1s are one of the most exciting medical advances to become available to patients in our lifetime and will transform health over the coming years. These medications are fundamentally metabolic treatments, and metabolic health intersects deeply with women's reproductive health. We're seeing this across fertility care, postpartum recovery, and long-term health through menopause and midlife. 

Within our fertility benefit for employers, we see some of our fertility clinic partners bringing GLP-1 prescribing in-house because of the impact it has on PCOS. In 2021, roughly 2-3% of PCOS patients were prescribed a GLP-1. That number is now up to 17-18%, a 7x increase in just a few years. 

We also see the linkages between weight management and mental health during a woman’s reproductive years. I know moms who gained significant weight during pregnancy and couldn't shed it afterwards — due to biology, or the operational overload of new parenthood — and slipped into real depression. We see this. And we see the way women are too often told it's just part of the process.

For GLP-1s, we prescribe FDA-approved medications only, we don't compound. Brand-name drugs are safer, and as they become more affordable, we believe that's the right standard of care. We hope with more research, they will be covered across women's reproductive health. We believe access to safe and effective metabolic care should be 100% covered and part of comprehensive women's healthcare — particularly given implications across fertility, postpartum, menopause, and long-term bone and cardiovascular health in women. 

As with most Maven launches, this is also personal. 

I've grown up with Maven, across miscarriage, fertility, pregnancy, and pediatric journeys. I’ve been lucky to work with exceptional providers both on and off Maven. But as I look back, I’ve also been the recipient of errant advice that has impacted my reproductive health journey, and I've had misdiagnoses that have led me searching across an imperfect system. And now that I'm in my 40s, squarely looking ahead to perimenopause, where my health feels like it matters more than ever, it's shocking how few answers I have that piece it all together. 

These reminders sit beneath everything we do. The future of consumer health won't just be about more tools. We are paving the way to new clinical models — rigorous, deeply integrated, and accessible to every woman. 

After a decade building that model inside the healthcare system, we’re excited to open our doors this spring — if you'd like to be among the first, join our waitlist here.