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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Moms Call Mahmee

Linda and Melissa Hanna, a mother and her daughter from the San Fernando Valley, have created Mahmee, an online platform launched at the end of 2015 to connect moms with available maternity care professionals. The Studio City company originally focused more on breastfeeding questions and post-partum support, but has evolved to include hospitals and health system connections, as well as patients and practitioners in the maternity sector. “Now when you get discharged from the hospital, you don’t have to go home empty handed. Your doctor can set you up with an account on Mahmee,” said Melissa Hanna. Valley Pediatrics and Boulevard Pediatrics, both in Encino, and Pediatric Associates in Sherman Oaks are some of the organizations signed on to use the Mahmee platform. The site also has a physician advisory board to help get patients to the right people or provide more pertinent information. “Without our doctor team, sometimes we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. We really are dependent on the physicians,” added Linda Hanna. Mahmee earns revenue through contracts with health systems and provider groups. Patients not under a provider contract pay a $5 per month subscription. Many organizations on Mahmee have begun introducing patients to the platform with a free one-month subscription. The app is available in the L.A. market as well as Pittsburgh, Pa. and across New Jersey as a statewide effort to reduce infant mortality rates. With a background in law and business, daughter Melissa Hanna handles operations, legal and finance, while mother Linda deals with the health care industry. Sunny Walia serves as chief technology officer for Mahmee, and is also a co-founder of the online platform. The Hannas hope that with more professionals and families using Mahmee, misinformation, or details that may not pertain to what a new mother is going through, is curbed. Having the platform as a hybrid “software-plus company” helps, with real people working the phones to support families on a daily basis. “Everyone deserves to have someone to talk to about what they’re going through. No AI, no chat bots, just real people supporting real care,” said Melissa Hanna about Mahmee’s live services. “When you’ve got a new baby at home and you’re panicky and you’re just wondering if you’re doing it right, sometimes an article or a video isn’t the right solution. Sometimes you just need to jump on the phone with someone.” Investment challenge Although their venture is now funded by Cross Culture Ventures in Culver City and Pipeline Angels in New York, the Hannas had difficulty pitching their platform in its early stages. Investors viewed the team as an atypical startup. Melissa is half black, with a dad from the Bahamas and mother from the states. Linda is not in the typical age range for those seeking VC funding. According to Digital Undivided, black female entrepreneurs raised only .0006 percent of a total $425 billion in tech venture funding in 2018. Only 34 black female founders raised more than $1 million in outside venture funding – Melissa Hanna is on that list. Even when the two got investors to listen, they had to fight to keep their big idea intact. “Some people liked the idea but they weren’t health care people and couldn’t help us that much in the beginning, or they wanted it to be something else and say ‘we’ll invest if you only focus on the moms,’ ‘we’ll invest if you only focus on the lactation program,’” Melissa Hanna explained. “We had to say no to that because we knew there’s strength in connecting everyone together. That’s the most powerful opportunity.” Four years later, Mahmee has taken care of more than 10,000 new families and has partnered with roughly a dozen hospitals and health systems. Within the next month, the founders plan to announce more funding news. Nursing expertise Linda Hanna has worked at the Henry Mayo Clinic, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, among other health care systems, to create and launch maternity care programs. She started My Nursing Coach in 2010, taking what was essentially a doctor’s office on wheels to new moms in the San Fernando Valley. Her daughter, Melissa, has worked for a number of startups to build secure apps. Melissa had watched her mother struggle to chart appointments and connect new moms with her network of specialists under My Nursing Coach. “I grew up knowing about this industry and learning about it over the years from my mom and her colleagues, and just hearing the highs and lows, the frustrations of working in maternity health care and not having all the resources and support tools to be able to provide ongoing outpatient support to new families. Most of their experience isn’t happening in the doctor’s office or hospital, it’s in the home setting,” said Melissa. “I realized there were a lot of people like (my mother) out there, a lot of great lactation consultants across the Valley and L.A.” Putting that experience to work in Mahmee resulted in personalized profiles to help new moms cut down on unnecessary information and get to what will help them most, based on the stage of pregnancy or the age of the baby.

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