Women wait an average of seven to ten years to be diagnosed with endometriosis. For PMOS, fibroids, perimenopause and dozens of other conditions, the story is similar, typically involving dismissed symptoms and fragmented care.
Kelly Lacob spent her career in diagnostics watching this play out, and then watched it happen during her own mother’s ovarian cancer care journey. On Wednesday, Lacob launched a platform called Xella Health, which she said is designed to fill the gaps in a healthcare system that was never really designed with women’s biology in mind.
Lacob — who has held leadership roles at companies including Medtronic Labs, Visby Medical and Mammoth Biosciences — is serving as Xella’s CEO. She co-founded the startup with Adriana Dantas and Jesus Ching, two other diagnostics veterans.
Xella starts with a blood draw at a local lab, then runs it against more than 100 biomarkers — mainly hormones, proteins and metabolic markers — to screen for over 140 conditions specific to women.
What makes this different from a standard panel isn’t just the breadth of what it tests, but also how it interprets the results, Lacob noted. Rather than flagging what falls outside a normal range, the platform looks for patterns across all the markers together and compares them against what’s optimal for a woman at her specific life stage, she explained.
The results feed into a personalized report with an action plan, and patients get paired with a telehealth clinician who can prescribe medications, order follow-up testing or refer out to specialists.
Lacob said that this type of care layer is key. She had seen too many companies hand women a dense data report with nowhere to go.
“It’s really important to us that this translates into actually improved care,” Lacob remarked. “That ended up transforming Xella from just a testing and diagnostic company to an integrated care delivery company as well.”
Xella is priced at $499 a year. Lacob said this price was deliberately chosen to undercut the concierge-style practices that offer similar depth of care, which can run thousands of dollars annually. The membership includes the core testing panel, a personalized report and at least two clinician consultations, with additional visits costing $35 each.
The company is targeting women between 30 and 55. Lacob noted this demographic spans four broad groups: those planning for fertility or dealing with infertility, women navigating perimenopause, patients with chronic undiagnosed symptoms like pelvic pain or GI issues, and health optimizers who want to get ahead of conditions they might be predisposed to.
Xella launched with a waitlist of 15,000 women, which Lacob pointed out was built mainly through organic social media.
The company has raised $4.7 million in pre-seed funding from Precursor Ventures, Capital F, Ulu Ventures and Swizzle Ventures, and it plans to raise another round of seed funding in September to help scale the platform, Lacob said.
“We really want to make precision healthcare and concierge healthcare as accessible and scalable to as many women as possible,” she declared.
Photo: Natalia Lebedinskaia, Getty Images
