In March 2023, Kelly Lacob sat down with her two co-founders to talk through a company idea. Her mother had just entered hospice care. By June, she was gone. By September, Xella Health was incorporated.

The thread connecting those months is not sentiment. It is a design brief. Lacob’s mother had lived with ovarian cancer for 14 years, became an advocate for the Women’s Cancer Center at Stanford, and still died from a disease that current diagnostics cannot reliably catch early. Lacob, who had spent her career building diagnostics at Mammoth Biosciences and Visby Medical, kept returning to the same question: What would earlier detection have changed?

Three years later, Xella has launched a women’s precision health platform that screens for more than 130 conditions using over 100 biomarkers, and built a 50,000-person waitlist at $6 per lead. On September 23, Xella announced an integration with Oura —the world’s most valuable standalone wearable company, valued at approximately $11 billion. Lacob calls it “the healthcare intelligence layer and operating system for women’s health.”

A System Built To Fail Women, And The Data That Proves It

Across 770 disease types, a University of Copenhagen study of 6.9 million people found women were diagnosed an average of four years later than men. Studies have documented diagnostic delays for endometriosis ranging from seven to 10 years globally, though recent U.S. data suggest the gap may be narrowing.

In 1977, the FDA issued guidelines excluding women of childbearing potential from Phase I and early Phase II drug trials, a policy so broadly applied it covered women using contraception and those whose husbands had vasectomies. The rule was not reversed until 1993 . The result is medicine built on a male default. One that still shows up in emergency rooms today, where women presenting with cardiovascular symptoms are sent home at significantly higher rates than men with the same signs.

Lacob puts the responsibility where it belongs: on the system, not the clinicians. “If they haven’t been trained in medical school to ask about symptoms of perimenopause or to ask about those subtle symptoms of cardiovascular disease that look different in women, that’s not their fault,” she noted. “It’s a system that has not trained them properly to look for those biases and understand them.”

Cardiovascular disease illustrates the problem precisely. Men are more prone to large arterial blockages. Women more commonly present with microvascular disease, and those symptoms look different. Ovarian cancer is routinely called a silent killer, yet early signals—bloating, abdominal fullness, and constipation—exist. They are simply not what most clinicians are trained to look for.

The global women’s health market was valued at $420–$470 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $600-$650 billion by 2030, according to PwC 2026 . These figures include conditions that uniquely (e.g., menopause), differently (e.g., cardiovascular diseases and behavioral health), and disproportionately affect women (e.g., autoimmune disorders, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s disease).

Infrastructure First, Then Everything Else

Most consumer health companies layer their products on top of Quest or LabCorp and call it precision medicine. Xella built its own CLIA-certified, CAP-accredited dry lab at the pre-seed stage, an unusual capital allocation for a company that had raised $4.7 million total. It was not accidental.

Wet lab processing for Xella’s current 100-plus biomarker panel runs through Quest and LabCorp. Deeper genomics work such as DNA and RNA sequencing, methylation patterns, and isoform analysis goes through Pyramid Genomic Services in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Once that data arrives, Xella’s proprietary algorithms run the multi-omic analysis in-house. The team that built this infrastructure includes specialists from GRAIL, 23andMe, Mammoth Biosciences, and Arc Bio.

What the platform does with that data is the real differentiator. Rather than flagging whether a biomarker falls outside a standard reference range, Xella maps relationships across more than 100 biomarkers simultaneously, tracking trajectories over time against each woman’s individual baseline. A small shift in one marker may be meaningless in isolation. The same shift appearing in five related markers, none yet technically “abnormal,” may signal early dysfunction in a system the standard lab panel would miss entirely.

Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, led the pre-seed round. “They’re bringing together advanced diagnostics, AI-powered intelligence, and clinical care into a unified system designed specifically around women’s biology and evolving health needs,” Hudson noted.

The earliest application of this infrastructure was not the 100-biomarker panel Xella launched commercially. It was endometriosis. In 2024, the team took menstrual fluid samples from 28 women—half with confirmed diagnoses, half without—and ran multi-omic profiling across methylation data and mRNA expression. The model correctly classified every sample.

A larger study of 200 women is underway, and Xella expects to bring a CLIA-route endometriosis risk tool to market before the end of 2026, with an FDA clinical diagnostic pathway to follow.

The Oura integration is the first public proof that Xella’s hub-and-spoke architecture works beyond its own walls.

The integration runs in four steps: Members share Oura-collected data, including heart rate variability, sleep, temperature trends, recovery, and menstrual cycle insights, with Xella. Xella’s diagnostics identify the biological drivers behind what the wearable has detected. It’s clinicians build a personalized care plan. Then Oura’s continuous monitoring tracks whether that plan is working over time. It is the difference between a snapshot and a story.

Dr. Chris Curry, clinical director of women’s health at Oura, captured the clinical rationale plainly: “Women’s health doesn’t happen in one moment or one visit, which is why we’re integrating Oura’s broader data and insights, including the Menopause Impact Scale, into platforms like Xella that support women across a range of needs, from trying to conceive and fertility optimization to cycle irregularity and menopause.”

Oura’s Menopause Impact Scale is a 22-item validated, patient-reported measure that more than 600,000 members have completed since its May 2026 launch. That scale now flows into Xella’s clinical workflow alongside diagnostic data, giving clinicians longitudinal context that a quarterly blood draw cannot provide.

Adriana Dantas, Xella’s co-founder and COO, frames the value in terms of who has historically carried the burden of fragmented care. “She doesn’t have to be the one connecting the dots,” Dantas observed.

$6 A Lead And 50,000 Reasons The Market Is Ready

Before Xella spent meaningfully on paid marketing, it had built a waitlist of 50,000 women through largely organic social media. The cost per lead came in at $6 against an industry norm of $20 to $40 for e-commerce companies in the health space.

That number is not a marketing story. It is a demand signal, and it tells you something the investment community is only beginning to price in. Women were not waiting for a better wellness app. They were waiting for someone to take their symptoms seriously and tell them what to do next. “I want to better understand what’s happening in my body,” Lacob heard consistently in voice-of-customer research, “and I want someone to help tell me what to do next.”

Xella’s marketing team found a way around the persistent digital suppression of women’s health content by targeting symptoms rather than condition names: pelvic pain, fatigue, cycle disruption, and GI issues. This approach reached women at the point of their lived experience rather than a diagnosis many have never been given. Taylor Hansen, Xella’s chief marketing and commercial officer, sees the business logic clearly. “Women don’t need more health data. They already have enough on their minds,” he noted. “What they need is a way to make sense of it.”

Xella’s $499 annual membership is priced to undercut concierge medicine, accepts Health Savings Account (HSA) and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) payments, and is available in 48 states. But it still has no insurance coverage, and New York and New Jersey residents cannot enroll until 2027.

Lacob spent the early part of her career in global health working with underserved populations, and she is not comfortable with the gap between the company she is building and the company she wants to build. “I want the mom in Michigan with three kids who’s working two jobs to have the same quality of healthcare as a woman in Palo Alto,” she told the audience at a recent event.

A longer-term reimbursement strategy is in development, alongside ongoing work to reduce the cost of goods on the deep genomics work, analysis sophisticated enough that it is not available through a standard clinical visit.

The seed round she is preparing to close—targeting $8 million to $10 million—will fund B2B pilots with fertility and OB-GYN clinics, a specialist referral network, and community spaces where women can find clinical coaching alongside peer support, without the misinformation that saturates the Facebook groups and Reddit threads they are using now.

Hudson frames the ambition in terms of category creation rather than market share: “We believe Xella has the potential to help define an entirely new category of women’s healthcare, one that is proactive, personalized, and built around the whole woman, rather than being fragmented across specialties, life stages, and isolated clinical encounters.”

Lacob started this company three months after her mother died, driven by a question she still has not fully answered: What would earlier detection have changed the outcome for her mother? The architecture she is building is her best attempt at the answer, for the next woman, and the one after that.