Menopause Marks the Beginning Of A 40-Year Health Conversation

Recently, a patient in her late 80s came to Midi needing vaginal estrogen—a standard, well-established treatment for the genitourinary effects of menopause. She should have had it years earlier. The fact that she chose a telehealth startup rather than a primary care office or a gynecologist says something important about how comprehensively medicine has failed this population.

Strober is working to replace that failure with something more accurate: Menopause is the point at which the next four decades of a woman's health begin to take shape. "The things that we can give you in your 40s should make a huge impact in your 70s," she explains. Hormone deficiencies that start early can slow bone loss and prevent osteoporosis. Emerging research links estrogen to cardiovascular protection and cognitive health. And there are interventions that have nothing to do with hormones at all.

One of the most striking: the shingles vaccine. Midi's clinical data points toward a roughly 30% reduction in dementia risk among women who receive it, a finding that most clinical conversations never surface. "It looks to us like the shingles vaccine is one of the best things you could do to prevent getting dementia," Strober emphasizes.

This is where she draws a distinction that rarely appears in standard clinical discourse. Midi practices what she calls "evidence-informed care" rather than evidence-based care—acting on emerging research when the downside of waiting is low. The rationale is direct: women's health has been so underfunded and underresearched for so long that waiting for full clinical proof means women wait forever. To begin closing that gap with its own patient data, Midi recently launched a research institute and hired its first director.

When The Open Web Gets Women's Health Wrong, Midi Builds Its Own AI

Midi uses artificial intelligence extensively, but not the way most health technology companies do.

The standard approach is to plug into existing AI infrastructure and apply it to clinical workflows. Strober tried that and found a structural problem. "Open evidence is all evidence," she observes. "It doesn't weigh newer evidence versus older evidence. It doesn't weigh biased evidence versus unbiased evidence. Particularly for women's health, it is just off quite often."

For hormone therapy, cancer survivorship, and other areas where women's health data is historically thin or skewed toward male populations, she found general AI unreliable. So Midi is building a proprietary clinical AI trained on its own care protocols and four years of patient data. It is deliberately sealed off from the broader internet for the topics where general AI fails women most.

The architecture inverts a well-documented problem. The same algorithmic infrastructure that misclassifies women's health content as adult material on social platforms and buries it in search results also shapes what general AI systems know—and don't know—about women's bodies. Midi's response was to wall it off entirely and build from its own data up.

In practice, Midi's AI reviews patient charts against established care protocols and flags deviations for clinician review. It does not replace clinical judgment or deliver care directly. "The AI is not providing the care," Strober explains. "The AI would be alerting us that a care protocol was not followed." A physician remains in the loop on every flagged case.

The goal, counterintuitively, is more human connection, not less. By automating documentation, prior authorization, and scheduling, Midi's AI frees nurse practitioners to do what brought them to medicine in the first place. "It should enable our providers to spend less time working on pre-authorization, less time working on billing, less time working on fighting with the pharmacies," Strober adds, "and to be able to really concentrate their effort on empathy."

The Number Strober Tracks Has Nothing To Do With Revenue

When Evie Kevish, 46, of Chicago, came to Midi, she wasn't looking for symptom relief alone. "With Midi Health, I finally feel seen, heard, and supported," she notes. "Their specialized expertise in midlife women's health and the convenience of telehealth gave me so much more confidence in the care I was receiving."

Carroll Schreibman, 57, of San Francisco, describes the experience in starker terms. "Within three months, I was sleeping better, had more energy, and experienced significantly less brain fog," she explains. "It may sound like an overstatement, but it truly changed my life—I felt like I had stepped out of a dark room into the sunlight."

That before-and-after is what Strober is optimizing for—and it shows in how she measures success. Her most important metric is not revenue, patient volume, or clinical outcomes data. It is referral rates. "I just need, if women tell their friends and their daughters to come to us—that's the most important thing for us," she emphasizes.

At 25,000 patients seen per week and 45 million covered lives across all 50 states, those referrals are compounding. Eric Kim, co-founder and managing partner at Goodwater Capital—a consumer technology investor whose portfolio includes Spotify, not hospital systems—sees the signal clearly. "For decades, women have been told to just 'deal with' midlife health issues, and Midi Health is finally challenging that status quo," Kim notes. "It's rare to see a company combine this level of empathy with real clinical credibility, which is why it is so compelling."

That Goodwater led this round, rather than a traditional healthcare investor, signals where Strober is taking Midi: toward a consumer brand that grows the way trusted consumer brands grow—through the women it serves.

The 87-Year-Old Who Found Her Way To A Unicorn

The woman who believes she is done with menopause is not an outlier. She is the norm—shaped by a system that undertreated her symptoms, underfunded research into her biology, and handed her AI tools built on data that largely excluded her.

Midi's billion-dollar valuation is not proof that those structural failures are resolved. As detailed in "Women's Health Is Breaking Records and Breaking No Ceilings" in Forbes, a record investment year concentrated in two companies is not the same as a thriving ecosystem. It is proof, however, that the care gap was larger than medicine and investors admitted—and that one company built a durable path through it, one referral at a time.

"Women's health has been treated like an afterthought for too long," Strober warns. "This funding gives us the resources to rewrite that story at scale."

The 87-year-old who needed vaginal estrogen and found her way to a startup shouldn't have had to. That she did is the whole story.