Victoria Thain Gioia never imagined herself as a founder. The decision came to her after an unexpected life event that left her with more questions than answers. In 2019, her daughter, Imogen, was born with a cleft.

“At her 20-week scan, I was dealing with surgeons and care and tests and conversations with a lot of doctors,” she shares with me over Zoom from her home in San Francisco. “It really started a conversation around prenatal nutrition, and I started just going down this rabbit hole as a type-A millennial mom, just trying to understand the why and the how.”

The Problem With One-Size-Fits-All Women’s Health

What she found left her even more confused.

“It was all very one-size-fits-all,” she says of the vitamin and supplement industry. “The onus was completely on this woman to do all her research, to read the back of every label, to figure out what she needed, when, what was more, what was less, what was important for her, and how much her body was changing.”

She kept circling back to the same question , which became the original premise for her business: “Why am I trusting formulations that were created in the ’70s and not really reflective of women’s bodies today?”

Her answer was that women needed products designed specifically for them, backed by doctors and scientific research. “I want to create a vitamin brand that was specific to women throughout their entire life stages,” she told her then-OB/GYN, who later became her medical co-founder.

Building a Women’s Health Brand During COVID

In January 2020, they decided to go all in on this mission. Victoria quit her job and founded Perelel. Her intention was to raise a pre-seed round that spring. We all know what came next.

“The world literally shut down,” she sighs. “It was just horrible timing.”

However, a global pandemic was not the only challenge she faced from investors. Most seemed to largely underestimate the overall women’s health category.

“A lot of the people that we did even get in front of... weren’t investing in new brands ,” she says. “One man said, ‘Well, how long is the pregnancy window, anyway?’” She was astounded, she shares, quipping back, “Longer than you think.”

Pregnancy, she points out, is only one part. There is the process of preparing to conceive, fertility, infertility, pregnancy and postpartum.

Without institutional capital, Victoria cobbled together friends-and-family and angel funding, putting more money into the business herself than she had planned, but says in those early days it gave them extra operational focus.

How Perelel Turned Customer Feedback Into a Growth Strategy

“It made us really, really focused on a path to profitability, a sustainable business model, making every dollar count, the unique economics of the business,” she says. “Ultimately, it has put us in a much better position.”

An example of this is that for the first year, Victoria personally answered every single customer service ticket.

“It was a lot,” she says. “But it meant that I deeply understood our customers. We moved quickly and acted on it.”

With limited funding, every marketing dollar had to count. The company leaned into social media, storytelling and education, bringing doctors and specialists into the brand.

“At the moment that we launched, there was nothing that looked like this,” Victoria says. “There was nothing that said, ‘This for conception. This for your first trimester. This for your second trimester.’”

The response surprised even the team.

“Within the first six weeks, we’d shipped to all 50 states,” she says. “That even surprised us.”

From Prenatal Vitamins to the Broader Women’s Health Market

Institutional funding eventually followed. Unilever Ventures led an investment round in 2022 and later its Series A. Last year, Prelude Growth Partners led a $27 million growth round, which also gave early angel investors an opportunity to realize a return.

Now Victoria says the company is highly profitable and has reached $100 million in revenue.

The next phase is about going deeper : expanding products across women’s reproductive life cycle, investing in clinical research and building trust.

“We want to continue to make clinically backed products that support her throughout her life,” she says.

And increasingly, that means meeting women wherever they are looking for health products, from the company’s own site to Amazon and new physical partnerships such as Bluestone Lane .

“How do we show up IRL for this woman?” Victoria asks. “And have these other opportunities for how we find her, or how she finds us?”

Six years after launching a business nobody had planned for, Victoria is no longer debating whether there is a market for women’s health. She is building for how big that market can become.