Founders Everywhere: Maureen Brown
Founders Everywhere: Maureen Brown
Maureen Brown is the co-founder & CEO of Mosie Baby, and co-inventor of the groundbreaking Mosie Baby at Home Insemination Kit which has helped over 100,000 people on their path to pregnancy.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Remarkable progress has been made in the field of fertility over the years, offering new hope and opportunities for those who want to be parents. Unfortunately, many families still struggle with limited and often expensive options for conception. Home insemination is a groundbreaking approach to family planning that empowers individuals and couples to take control of their fertility journey in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Mosie Baby makes home insemination an accessible and viable choice for those seeking to conceive. Their syringe is the first device patented and designed for at-home intravaginal insemination. Their innovative technologies are destigmatizing and democratizing the process and they just raised a $1M financing round. Their $129 Mosie Baby at-Home Insemination Kit is available online, in the Optum Store, and in select CVS stores, providing two insemination attempts per kit, along with supportive and educational instructions for the user.
Co-founders and partners, Maureen Brown and Marc Brown embarked on a deeply personal and challenging journey that ultimately led to the creation of Mosie Baby. After two and half years of trying to conceive at home, they went to a fertility clinic. They were frustrated that their only options were expensive and invasive procedures. Drawing from their own experiences and insight from a fertility specialist, Maureen and Marc are pioneering home insemination. Their journey not only led to the birth of their second child (the first Mosie Baby), but also became the driving force behind Mosie’s mission to help others on their path to parenthood. Over the past seven years Mosie Baby has helped over 100,000 people inseminate at home on their own terms and Maureen, CEO, shares more.
What is Mosie Baby’s North Star?
Our vision is to remove the stigma associated with artificial insemination and add Mosie Baby to the vernacular to establish a language to describe a way to make a baby at home. We're doing that to uplift this process of home insemination for all. Our North Star is to hear the term "Mosie" used widely and understood as a method for building a family with love. “We’re going to Mosie this weekend!”
Why the name Mosie Baby?
People did suggest some really fun names that were not appropriate, but Mosie was my husband’s nickname for me and had some resonance with what we're doing, “mosey on up there.” He no longer calls me Mosie, but it has personal significance and was a fitting name.
How is Mosie Baby an innovator in the fertility space?
We are democratizing access to fertility care at home. Fertility has been an exclusive treatment for those who have the ability to access it. It's out of reach for people financially and also logistically. There are people who have to drive two hours one way to get to the nearest fertility clinic and they have to have a lifestyle and job that allows them to rearrange their life. We're at the forefront of consumerization of healthcare and the next generation of parents are looking for thoughtful, accessible, empowering ways to take charge of their health at home and this includes fertility.
What sets Mosie Baby apart?
We created the market for home insemination in the United States and we're designing what is an ideal home insemination device. We are made in the USA and FDA compliant. We have a patented syringe that mimics Mother Nature with a slit opening to create a gentler, wider, longer spread than syringes with a circular opening.
We also just launched our proprietary cup for collection. Traditional semen collection cups are actually just urine specimen collection cups and they hold 40-60 milliliters of volume and semen is only about 3-5 milliliters, so urine collection cups are not ideal for collecting, storing and transferring. We simplified the cup and to make it easy for the user collecting the sample and the transfer.
Any favorite books?
I think a great book for founders is Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown and then a phenomenal book for everyone is Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski PhD, Emily Nagoski, et al.
I'm also a fan of Blinkist. It's short versions of books, so if you're looking for information on finance or a specific area and you're not in the mood to read a 250 page book on it or listen to 10 hours of podcasts you can listen to a 15 minute Blinkist.
Fun fact:
Our Mosie Baby at-Home Insemination Kit is on display in the Designing Motherhood exhibition at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center until the end of the year. The critically acclaimed exhibition explores the arc of human reproduction through design and art.
Here are some amazing success stories from the Mosie community, Good Morning America, and actress Molly Bernard.
Episode 14 of the Venture Everywhere podcast, Catch You on the Bonside with Neha Govindraj and Jenny Fielding is out. Listen on Apple, Spotify, Pandora and check out all our past episodes here.
