Alex Taylor, co-founder of women’s hormonal supplement brand Perelel, worked with lawmakers earlier this year in DC to advance new legislation that would make postnatal vitamins eligible for HSA/FSA coverage.
Taylor understands that lobbying in Congress is just one element of an ongoing battle around women’s health. Part of that fight is a broader push to expand access to postpartum care. "There isn't a coordinated advocacy infrastructure focused on postnatal nutrition or access. And transparently, that gap is also part of the issue,” Taylor told BeautyMatter.
In the United States, 84% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, and 53% occur after delivery. Yet, 57% of postpartum individuals in the US do not receive any routine follow-up care, raising the toll to 61% for mothers aged 20-24.
According to the 2025 report by the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health, U.S. Counties with the Highest Maternal Mental Health Risk and Lowest Resources Revealed, mental health conditions—including overdose and suicide—are the leading cause of maternal mortality in America, accounting for 22.5% of pregnancy-related deaths according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. The majority of these deaths occur in the postpartum period, when access to mental health screening and care is at its lowest. The report also highlighted how 84% of birthing-aged US women still live in areas with a shortage of maternal mental health resources.
Data collected by McKinsey shows that every dollar invested in women's health yields $3 in economic growth. Yet, the World Economic Forum's 2026 Women's Health Innovation Radar found that only 20% of all health research and development goes toward the study of women's health conditions, and more than half of that funding is concentrated in only two areas: ovarian cancer and menopause.
Perelel is working to change that. Founded in 2020 by Victoria Thain Gioia and Alex Taylor, alongside medical co-founder Dr. Banafsheh Bayati, a board-certified practicing OB/GYN, Perelel is the first gynecologist-founded prenatal vitamin company that has scaled out of its prenatal origin, now offering support for more stages of a woman’s hormonal journey, from preconception to perimenopause. The company has raised $37.2 million across three rounds of funding, most recently a $27 million growth investment from Prelude Growth Partners in November 2025; acquired women's health education platform Loom in 2024; and more than doubled its year-over-year revenue since launch.
Perelel sells direct-to-consumer and is available at stockists such as Amazon and Erewhon. In November 2022, the brand became Erewhon's first co-branded product collaboration in the grocer's 56-year history, with its Women's and Men's Daily Vitamin Packs + Bloat Relief.
"As a founder who is also a consumer and a patient, I hear from women every day navigating the many challenges of postpartum without the systematic support they (and their children) need to thrive. This creates a responsibility to lean in where systems have not fully caught up,” Taylor said.
Specifically: mental health screening, sustained nutritional repletion, lactation support, and care coordination across the dozen or more professionals a postpartum patient typically encounters. These gaps are reinforced by 2024 UC Berkeley School of Public Health research, which shows that US clinicians complete just 62% of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’s (ACOG)'s recommended postpartum care components at the first visit.
Leaning into these gaps is exactly how Perelel is future-proofing the category.
The American postpartum landscape is broken.
“Postpartum is a critical stage of maternal health with real short-term and long-term implications for both mom and baby. Yet this phase has historically received much less formalized support in the US,” Taylor explained. "The postpartum period involves significant psychological recovery and nutrient demands, yet it is still treated like an optional wellness phase rather than a critical period that requires support,” she added.
Postpartum care is exponentially worse for people with limited funds. Access to care compounds the disparity. The Black community faces significantly higher rates of postpartum complications than the general population, including hemorrhage, hypertensive disorders, and cardiomyopathy, and is more likely to experience their first postpartum check-up later than white women, if at all. Without that visit, treatable conditions can become fatal.
The maternal mortality ratio (MMR), defined as the number of maternal deaths during a given time period due to complications from pregnancy or childbirth per 100,000 live births, is affected by diverse reproductive journeys, maternal morbidities, and socioeconomic factors. US MMR data, when analyzed by race, consistently show that Black women are disproportionately affected.
United States of Care’s The State of Postpartum Care Data Report details that women in the Southern states are 50 times more likely to live in a maternity care desert, where there’s an undersupply of maternity care providers, especially midwives, than women in the Northeast of the country. Louisiana and Mississippi have been found to have the highest rates of maternal and child mortality in the country.
Global analysis conducted by The Lancet discovered that five other high-income countries in the study (Australia, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK) all guarantee new mothers at least one home visit by a midwife or nurse within the first week postpartum; the US does not. These home visits allow providers to address mental health concerns and assess social determinants of health, including food, housing, and financial security, as well as protection from domestic violence. Without them, the postpartum care system fails.
Gaps in care also exist for trans and gender-nonconforming people; research on both pregnancy and birthing experiences, including mortality rates, is seriously lacking for this demographic. However, a May 2026 scoping review found that sexual and gender minorities experience structural and interpersonal stigma rooted in institutionalized cisheteronormativity. Trans men and nonbinary patients reported being misgendered, denied care, and forced to self-advocate or self-conceal to receive compassionate treatment, echoing the institutionalized racism that affects communities of color in the medical system. Conversations surrounding postnatal (and prenatal) care should also include transgender and gender-diverse birthing individuals.
It's this understanding that makes Perelel a standout in the market. Its subscription-based, direct-to-consumer products provide expertly formulated vitamins for each stage in the reproductive/postpartum journey (including reproductive loss). Aiming to offer solutions across the entire hormone lifecycle, Perelel now includes daily women’s wellness and men’s health lines.
Additionally, the Los Angeles–based company has distributed $2.5 million worth of prenatal vitamins to underserved communities through its 1:1 giveback program to support those communities that lack access to essential prenatal care.
Product is one answer. Capital is another. But the women’s health investment landscape has its own paradoxical problem.
Deloitte discovered that, despite record US women’s health VC investment of $2.6 billion in 2024, investments in women’s health fell 56% in 2025 as healthtech funding rose to $28.6 billion—underscoring how critical life stages like postpartum remain structurally underfunded.
"From a business perspective, this is less about politics and more about an unmet need. Women are realizing the lack of support for these crucial stages, and the system needs to catch up,” Taylor said. The market is starting to respond.
In 2024, the US postpartum health supplements market generated $423.9 million, accounting for 31.5% of global market share. Projected to increase at a CAGR of 8.4% until 2033, the US market is expected to remain in the lead in terms of revenue during the forecast period.
Meanwhile, the telehealth sector has been a catalyst. In the last five years, it’s emerged as a welcome and well-needed addition to the postpartum care landscape, as it creates more accessibility for the communities most in need. And AI is next to disrupt the market, shifting care from clinics to homes.
But the maturity has outpaced clarity. When Perelel launched, the idea of “stage-specific nutrition” was not fully understood. Six years later, there’s more awareness, but there’s also ample confusion and misinformation, causing problems for consumers, from product safety to marketing propaganda.
Standing out in a saturated market of misleading claims, Perelel sets its standards high. Its formulations are developed by Perelel's medical co-founder, Dr. Banafsheh Bayati, alongside the company’s panel of OB/GYNs, maternal-fetal medicine doctors, doulas, and naturopaths, and the products are manufactured in cGMP-certified US facilities and third-party tested.
“Dietary supplements in the US are regulated by the FDA, under a framework that does not require standardized formulations for prenatals or postnatals, so there is a wide range of products on the market with their own definitions of what is needed. And this is risky,” she said.
The fragmentation runs deeper than formulation. A postpartum patient may interact with more than a dozen care professionals—OB/GYNs, pediatricians, midwives, mental health practitioners, doulas, lactation consultants, social workers—with little coordination between them.
Where VC has been slow and federal funding has been inconsistent, philanthropic capital has stepped in. The Maternal Mental Health Equity Fund, backed by Perigee Fund, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Community Health Acceleration Partnership, among others, pools resources specifically for BIPOC-led postpartum mental health work, signaling that the gap is being identified faster than the system can respond.
Perelel itself has committed $10 million to women's health research. $5.5 million has already been deployed, as well as funding for the Magee-Womens Research Institute.
Alongside Perelel’s efforts are those of the Gates Foundation, which, in 2025, committed $2.5 billion through 2030 to accelerate research and development in five critical, chronically underfunded areas of women’s health: obstetric care and maternal immunization; maternal health and nutrition; gynecological and menstrual health; contraceptive innovation; and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The obstetric care, maternal immunization, and maternal health and nutrition categories specifically seek to make pregnancy and delivery safer and healthier for newborns and parents, demonstrating that the postpartum care gap is finally being recognized at the institutional level.
Recognition is one step. Coordination is another. With very little communication between the various dimensions of postpartum recovery, much more than capital alone will be needed to narrow the gap. And this is where the brand’s category building comes in.
Perelel has always formulated its supplements around the reproductive life stages, treating postpartum as a distinct and essential phase that requires differentiated nutrition, care, and support.
"Women will spend more than 40% of their lives in a hormonal transition. And that needs to be reflected better in retail environments,” Taylor stated. She believes that retail still doesn’t understand how women experience their health, explaining that the sector places people into an oversimplified binary: pregnant, or not. Postpartum products get shelved into “general wellness” categories, which can make them harder to find and understand in context. “This creates friction for both consumers and the category writ large,” she added.
“There has been progress, particularly with retailers becoming more open to education at the shelf. But there is still an opportunity to build more intuitive, stage-based merchandising that better reflects how women move through these transitions,” Taylor noted.
In 2020, the hormone-informed company introduced the first stage-based prenatal vitamin system, with separate formulations for trimesters 1, 2, and 3. Perelel's postnatal offering, the Mom Multi Support Pack, is a daily packet containing a postnatal multivitamin, omega DHA + EPA, and cognitive support and beauty blends, formulated by OB/GYNs and doulas.
Notably, Perelel defines the postpartum period as lasting up to five years post-birth, significantly longer than the 12-month Medicaid extension threshold currently being debated at the federal level.
"The role of a brand has evolved,” Taylor said. “It's not just about what is in the products, but how you support and educate women through different phases of their health journey. And how you connect on a deeper, emotional level. Today, women want clarity and credibility. Plus, they want to be seen too."
Through Perelel and her policy work, Taylor is defining what the next phase of the category looks like.
Perelel’s November 2025 Prelude raise was positioned as funding for broader expansion to scale out of the pregnancy category. Simultaneously, Taylor doubled down on postpartum policy in DC.
In April 2026, Taylor co-hosted a congressional briefing on maternal and postpartum health, spending a day on the Hill lobbying for postnatal vitamins to become HSA- and FSA-eligible, just as prenatal vitamins are.
She met with representatives and senators, including Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL) and Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), to lobby for postnatal vitamin HSA/FSA eligibility—a push that could move through either the Appropriations Committee or a standard committee process without a budget fight, as it requires minimal lift from Congress and even fewer taxpayer dollars.
The ask sits inside a broader legislative architecture: Underwood's Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, co-led with Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), introduced in February 2021 and reintroduced in March 2026, is a package of 14 bills designed as the most comprehensive federal effort yet to address the US maternal health crisis—extending Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition eligibility into postpartum, growing the perinatal workforce, funding maternal mental health, and investing in community-based care. Gallego's Strong Start Act, introduced in February 2026 and co-supported with Sen. Booker, would provide a one-time direct payment to families to cover upfront infant costs, which currently range between $10,000 and $30,000 in the first year alone.
Medicaid finances 41.5% of all US births nationally, rising to 64.5% among Black mothers and 58.8% among Hispanic mothers, meaning federal coverage is the primary source of care for the populations facing the highest postpartum mortality risk.
However, federal Medicaid coverage has historically ended 60 days postpartum. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, later made permanent under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, gave states the option to extend that coverage to 12 months.
The President’s budget for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposes eliminating both the Title X Family Planning Program, and Healthy Start, the federal maternal and infant health programs designed to serve high-risk communities by supporting safe pregnancy and preventing maternal deaths.
Compounding the threat, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is projected to increase the number of uninsured Americans by more than 10 million by 2034. The figure rises to 14 million when combined with the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies that currently make marketplace insurance affordable for low-income households.
Taylor understands that this ask will not solve the postpartum care crisis in the United States. HSA and FSA eligibility is just one step. "Beyond eligibility, one of the biggest opportunities is establishing clearer standards for what constitutes a prenatal or postnatal product,” Taylor said. Major variability in formulations with limited standardization, she explained, can create even more confusion for consumers and limit trust in the category.
Establishing category standards is something Perelel and Taylor have been actively working on. "Founder-led advocacy can become a bridge until there is broader recognition and more widespread support,” Taylor concluded.
Until then, the work is falling to founders willing to walk into Capitol Hill themselves.