Malama Health Raises $9.2M to Scale Doula-Led Maternal Care for Women insured by Medicaid Nationwide
Malama Community Baby Shower in Solano County (2025)
Today, 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.
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.
That is what we built Malama to do.
What We Built, and How We Built It
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.
The Postpartum Gap No One Is Closing
The year after delivery is where most of the risk lives, and where the healthcare system most completely disappears.
Gestational diabetes is one of the clearest examples. It affects roughly 8% of pregnancies and, if left unmanaged after delivery, puts women at dramatically higher risk for Type 2 diabetes within five years. Yet most women who develop it during pregnancy receive no structured follow-up care in the postpartum period. They leave the hospital with a diagnosis and a recommendation to follow up, and that follow-up rarely happens. For Black, Indigenous, and Latina women, who face higher rates of gestational diabetes and are more likely to be insured through Medicaid, the gap is even wider.
A $2.3 million NIH grant is funding risk stratification and tailored postpartum support built around Malama’s CDC-certified Diabetes Prevention Program. A separate $900,000 from California state funding is expanding Malama’s doula-led care navigation services. Together they extend care from early pregnancy through at least 12 months postpartum, building the whole-person model this population has never had access to.
The NIH does not fund programs on good intentions alone. They fund programs because the evidence supports the approach. That federal investment, alongside state implementation dollars and venture capital converging on the same company, is its own signal about where maternal care infrastructure needs to go.
What We've Seen
From patient-reported outcomes data taken from more than 2,500 women show what’s possible when continuous support reaches those who need it most:
6% decrease in NICU admissions
9% decrease in C-section rates
38% decrease in preterm birth rates
A randomized controlled trial at Tufts Medical Center found that women who used Malama during pregnancy were 40% less likely to develop postpartum diabetes compared to standard care.
These outcomes happened because we put trained, employed, community-embedded care workers alongside women at the moments that matter most and kept them there.
Why Our Investors Believe in This
"Health equity in maternal care requires trust," said Veenu Aulakh, Director at Acumen America, who led our seed round." Through its Doula- Care Navigators, Malama has earned that trust in communities that have been failed by the healthcare system for generations, and the outcomes data show what's possible when you build care around women rather than around appointments."
"When I first met Mika, Malama didn't have the outcomes data or the health plan contracts. What it had was a founder who understood that serving Medicaid women meant building something that looked nothing like what the commercial market had built. That instinct turned out to be right. Malama built the workforce, the community relationships, and the clinical infrastructure to actually deliver on the promise, and the outcomes reflect that."
What This Funding Makes Possible
The seed round will fund three things: geographic expansion, workforce growth, and deeper health system integration.
We are expanding into additional states, building on the playbook we developed in California. We are growing our Doula-Care Navigator workforce, because the limiting factor in reaching more women is the trained, employed, community-rooted workforce to meet it. And we are deepening our partnerships with managed care organizations and community health centers, because sustainable Medicaid care delivery requires relationships with the plans and systems that govern it.
Malama partners with Medicaid managed care plans, operating within a network that spans Stanford Health Care, UCSF Health, UCLA Health, and more than 600 clinics and hospitals nationwide. Its navigators work inside the clinical relationships patients already have, not alongside them as a separate service.
A Note from Malama’s Founder
Building Malama has meant building an infrastructure the healthcare system did not already have. An employed workforce. Health plan contracts. Clinical escalation protocols. Trust with communities that have every reason to distrust the healthcare system.
The women Malama serves deserve a care team that knows their name, a doula who attends their birth, and a system that does not abandon them the moment they leave the hospital. That is what we are building. This funding means we can build it for more of them.
We are grateful to our investors, to the health plans and health systems who have taken this bet with us, and most of all to the women who have trusted us with their care.
If you are a health plan, health system, or community health center interested in working with Malama, we would love to hear from you at heymalama.co.
— Mika Eddy, Co-Founder and CEO, Malama Health
