LEIA, a Sweden-based startup focused on the Fourth Trimester, has raised just under $600K in funding to launch its app and advance postpartum care. Investors in this round include The Case for Her, Healthtech VC Crista Galli Ventures, The Angel Network Nyfikna Investerare, Fast Track Malmö, Danish family office Liseno as well as Erik Engellau-Nilsson from leading impact hub Norrsken, Johan Flodin from Kry, Jonas Axelsson and Erwan Lemmonier from Spotify.
90% of 140 million women giving birth globally each year are experiencing mental or physical difficulties during the Fourth Trimester. LEIA, founded in 2021 by Sandra Wirström and Astrid Gyllenkrok Kristensen, is on a mission to reinvent postpartum care for the the digital age. Both founders are mothers themselves and have experienced the challenges new parents face in the first months after giving birth first hand.
LEIA Co-founder Astrid Gyllenkrok Kristensen shares: “While you’re pregnant everyone asks you how you are or how they can help. The minute you give birth, however, attention shifts from the mother to the child, which can make it difficult for women to receive the care and support they need during the Fourth Trimester. There is hardly any personalized, evidence-based information available and fear of ‘being a bad mother’ keeps many from asking for help.”
In order to address this problem, LEIA is building, “the world’s first postpartum tracker” to help women (and in the future also their partners) navigate the time after giving birth. The mobile app asks the user questions and invites her to log her physical and mental wellbeing. Based on information shared, women receive personalized, evidence-based information, data-driven insights about their health and tools to change things for the better as needed. Information can also be shared with a midwife for a more personalized care experience. By digitalizing screening models for postnatal depression and other complications the app also helps to identify women at risk at a much earlier stage and refers them to the relevant expert.
A part of the new funds will go towards a joint pilot with leading research organization Karolinska Institute. One of the main goals of this research is to build a dataset, apply AI and machine learning, and in that way improve postpartum content and care recommendations in the app. Only limited data about the Fourth Trimester exists today, and another goal for LEIA is to contribute to research and as a result better care for mothers.
Astrid Gyllenkrok Kristensen explains: “We will be able to concretize and visualize the user’s health during this turbulent time and through that help them understand and improve it. Essentially we want to do for maternal health what Fitbit did for general health.”
The LEIA app is available for download in Sweden since January and will be available globally in March.
