Company leader
Marta Bralic Kerns
Founder and CEO
Pomelo Care
Marta Bralic Kerns is founder and chief executive of Pomelo Care, a virtual care company for pregnancy, newborns, and perimenopause that works mainly through Medicaid plans, insurers, and employers. A former McKinsey consultant and early Flatiron Health executive, she started Pomelo after her own pregnancy showed her how little personal data shaped maternity care.
Harvard, McKinsey, and Flatiron Health
Bralic Kerns holds a bachelor's degree in government and computer science from Harvard, Forbes reported. As a consultant at McKinsey she worked on Arkansas' Medicaid benefits for maternal care, her first close look at how maternity care is paid for.
In 2014 she joined Flatiron Health, the company Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg founded to use data to improve cancer treatment, which Roche bought in 2018. She worked on special projects there. Turner later told Forbes that there were four or five Flatiron employees who, “if they started a grilled-cheese company, I would put money into it,” and that she was one of them.
A Pregnancy That Raised Questions
While at Flatiron she became pregnant with her daughter. She had good doctors and good insurance, but her care felt haphazard and rarely drew on maternal health data. “That was such a stark disconnect to everything I was working in healthcare,” she told Forbes. Asking OB-GYNs and fetal medicine specialists about it, she learned that one in 10 babies is admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit, often for risks such as preeclampsia that could have been caught earlier.
Founding Pomelo Care
She left Flatiron and founded Pomelo in 2021, choosing to start with Medicaid patients. “We knew we wanted to be in Medicaid because it's 42% of births, it's the higher risk births, it's where there's gaps in access,” she told the Out-Of-Pocket newsletter in 2023. She has argued that Medicaid plans hold a company to a higher bar than employers do, because they ask to see quality measures and outcomes data, while employers focus more on how satisfied and engaged their employees are.
When insurers first heard her pitch, she told Forbes, they cut the problem slides short: “Within 10 minutes, people would say, ‘I know, I know, get to the solution.’” She also received Pomelo's care during her second pregnancy.
Taking Pomelo Beyond Maternity
In January 2026 Pomelo raised $92 million led by Stripes at a $1.7 billion valuation, and Bralic Kerns said the money would take the model to women and children at every life stage, including perimenopause and menopause. “Whether in their reproductive years and raising kids or in midlife and starting aging, women are not getting preventive care,” she told Forbes. In a letter on Pomelo’s site, she recalled spending months meeting health plans when Pomelo “was just an idea and a deck.”