How to Disrupt a Giant, Hopeless System Like Healthcare? Ask These Founders, Whose Startup Cuts Pregnancy Risks in Half. Oula is a new pregnancy care startup that's providing "incredible" results, while aligning the interests of insurance companies, hospitals, and patients.

There's no way around it: The data on maternal mortality rates in the United States is disturbing. A 2020 report found that out of 10 other developed, high-income countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) the U.S. came in dead last. And not by a small margin. Our maternal mortality rates are more than double the second-most-deadly country, France.

And it's only getting worse. Between 2019 and 2021, the CDC reported a 60% rise in maternal mortality rates (and maternal mortality rates among Black women are 2.6 times higher than white women).

These are the statistics that Elaine Purcell and Adrianne Nickerson found themselves confronting when they decided to have children. Having both spent their careers in healthcare, they were shocked by how little investment was going toward innovation in the maternity care space. So they started digging into the data on countries that were doing it better, and found something interesting.