This content was created by Girlboss in partnership with Trellis Health.
The US healthcare system is broken, especially for pregnant and postpartum women, but Estelle Giraud still considers herself a healthcare optimist. “The future of medicine will look different for our children. It’s not that far away,” she says.
Estelle is on a mission to create the healthiest generation yet with Trellis Health, a digital health platform designed to empower women with personalized, proactive care during pregnancy and postpartum. Trellis is not just another health app. It delivers personalized insights based on your actual health history—not population averages. It connects over a decade of your medical records from 50,000+ providers and uses that longitudinal data to establish your personal baselines, then compares new inputs—symptoms, labs, biometrics—against your own historical norms. That means your care is more accurate, context-aware, and responsive to change.
That is something Estelle wishes she had during her pregnancy with her son, who was conceived through IVF. “It was the first time that I was thrown into the healthcare system,” she says, “I ended up having prenatal hypertension and postpartum preeclampsia, and ended up in the hospital three days after I gave birth, but I was one of the lucky ones. But still, I felt very under-supported and like I was having to drive a lot of my proactive recovery postpartum. And I was like, ‘This is such a huge gap. We can radically change the way that women receive postpartum care in this country and add potentially decades of healthy life.’”
It’s a big feat, but after chatting with Estelle for an hour, I feel like more of a healthcare optimist, too. Estelle and I spoke about how women are the Chief Medical Officers of the family, why we shouldn’t always assume that being a woman founder is hard, and what she envisions for the future of family medicine.
So, you started out in academia as a research assistant professor in Australia and Asia, then pivoted to genomics and became a scientist. Tell me more about how your unique background has helped you build Trellis.
“I’m still a scientist at heart. I’m a data nerd. And I actually see a lot of parallels between the skillsets of being a scientist and being an entrepreneur. So like curiosity: how do you run good experiments? How do you come up with things that you want to test? How do you move quickly through that? There are a lot of parallels there.”
What were your biggest challenges during pregnancy and postpartum that led you to start Trellis?
“I’m an IVF mom. I wish more women would talk about this more openly and share, because it can be extremely isolating. I was basically a qualified nurse and giving myself injections every day. You take so much responsibility for your health, and it has such an impact on your life, and you’re just expected to be like, ‘See you later! Good luck! You’ll be fine! Then, at the same time, you’re not really empowered. Like, you’re still a patient. You are responsible for all of it yourself.
Did you know that the average appointment in the US for a doctor is 7½ to 8 minutes? It’s a bit longer for prenatal appointments. But they’re fast, high-pressure appointments. And it’s on you as a patient to be like, ‘What do I need to communicate? What’s important? What’s not?’ You’re filtering all the information that you’ve read online and with your own body, and trying to narrate that in a really efficient way in an 8-minute appointment. If I had a critically important 8-minute meeting for my job, I would have an agenda. I would have a dossier. I would have my list of questions. Why don’t we empower patients to have that for their health? Like we surveyed almost 500 women, and 9/10 women use Apple Notes to manage their health.”
What problem are you solving with Trellis?
“Women turn into the Chief Medical Officer of the family. We don’t have family doctors anymore. We don’t have that central point person. It's basically women—it's the head of the household. And that starts during pregnancy when they do it for their own body, but then also for their children. And it just compounds over decades, and they have little to no support. So, that's the core problem that we're addressing with Trellis.”
What makes your approach different?
“Our at-home postpartum lab panel is the first of its kind. Our panel tests over 30 critical biomarkers, including iron, vitamin D, thyroid function, hormones, and inflammation markers—all of which influence fatigue, mood, metabolism, and long-term resilience. It’s CLIA- and CAP-accredited, FDA-cleared, and delivered directly to your door with simple, painless collection. The results give you (and your care team) the data you need to spot issues early and rebuild your health with intention.”
How does it work exactly?
“Everything is done via API integration. Trellis is connected to almost 50,000 sites nationwide. They have advanced, highly secure identity verification. Trellis collects records on your behalf, processes them, and adds them to Trellis. So, it’s personalized from the beginning.
With a lot of apps, you have to put in the work to personalize them to your needs and put all of your information in. We've spent a lot of work on the data side. So, as soon as you land in the app, it knows you, it's got the context, and it can start to be valuable from the very beginning.
Say you have a pediatrician appointment and you’re held up in a meeting at work. Everything you need is in Trellis, not on a notepad, not in your head. You’ll have your list of questions prepared for you. It’s like the equivalent of an EA. So, your partner, husband, nanny, grandparent, whoever—the summary is there, the questions are there, it’s all there. So you can take your child to the appointment and review the notes and action items after. It's all in one place.
But I want to be clear: Trellis does more than just collect and store your health history. It’s care in your pocket. It provides clarity, insights—all of the things that we want out of our healthcare experience.”
Is it safe to use?
“We take privacy and security very seriously. It comes from my genomics background. I know how powerful this data is, and I know how important it is to keep it safe. We’re on a mission to create the most private and secure women’s health app that has ever existed. That’s why it’s a paid product. Many of these pregnancy apps are free products. They're monetizing through advertising. But you don't need more noise at this time. You just need some clarity and really personalized support. We are building valuable software for you—and that's the business model.”
What’s a key feature that you’re most excited about?
“We are calling it ‘Midwife in Your Pocket.’ So, it’s a text-based feature and there’s a human on the other side. So, say you walk out of an appointment and you've got a question or something you don't feel like you need to go back to your doctor for, but you would go to Google. You don't need to do that anymore. You can go in the Trellis app. The midwife can see the history, they can see the notes from the appointment, and they can get up to speed quickly. Unlike with telehealth, you don’t have to start from zero.”
Congrats on the $1.8M pre-seed, by the way!
“Thank you! Sixty percent of our cap table is women. They’ve built in this space, and they recognize the market opportunity. They know that this is not a charity thing; this is a real business opportunity. But not everybody gets that. Not everybody sees the opportunity. And especially at the current fundraising market, to raise a pre-seed as large as we have and with the cap table that we have is something that I am really proud of.”
What was the hardest moment in the fundraising process?
“The amount of times that we got put into an ‘It's a pregnancy app’ box. We were told that it’s automatically a small market, it’s too niche. So, I came up with this phrase that I would use. I've said it to a couple of investors: ‘Pregnancy affects everybody on this planet indirectly or directly. Every single person is here because somebody was pregnant. So you're telling me the entirety of humanity is a small market? Like, okay.”
What kinds of double standards do women founders face when raising money, especially in the early stages?
“A woman comes in and she's like, ‘Here's the market, here's how big it is. This is the product we're gonna build. I need $4 million. Let's go.’ And the question is, ‘Why are you qualified to do this? What's your track record? Come back to me with some traction.’ And so, you have to prove it before they give you money in a way that I don't think people expect for men.”
I also don’t want to assume that just because you’re a woman founder, it's automatically hard.
“I think we do a disservice to women entrepreneurs by saying it's hard. If you tell female founders, ‘You only get 2% of VC funding. It's really hard. There's all this bias,’ then as a female founder, you are walking into those meetings defensive. You are walking in thinking this is gonna be harder for me. So, I want more female founders to be like, ‘This is gonna be easy for me because I can do this. I know I can build a really good business, and I know I will get investors.’ By talking about all the negatives, we are inadvertently changing the confidence level of female founders.”
If Trellis achieves everything you dream it will, what does the future of family medicine look like?
“ I really, really do believe that we can build the healthiest generation ever. That means healthcare on your terms. I wanna see drug dosing guidelines built for women. I wanna see standards of care. I wanna see data for how people recover postpartum and how we preemptively identify risks for people, like when they happen, or before they happen, and intercept them, instead of people having 10 years of chronic disease [before getting diagnosed and treated]. Every single person has a story where a single piece of data can be life-changing.”
What’s next for Trellis?
“We’re starting with pregnancy and postpartum, but we envision that Trellis is a platform for quite literally anybody. We have very aggressive plans (within the next year or so) to expand to not just within the family unit, but pre-pregnancy, well past pregnancy, other women's health, men's health, elderly parents, etc. We’re starting with pregnancy and postpartum, however, because it is such an underserved area.”
And now onto Rapid Fire… Who are you inspired by?
“Hedy Lamarr, the old Hollywood screen siren. She was a model. She was an actress. And she actually holds the IP and patents for [co-inventing] the technology behind GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth. She was an engineer, too. I’m really inspired by these women who are in different fields—like they’re multihyphenates. You don’t have to fit in a box.”
How do you unwind?
“ I like not being told what to do and not having a plan. I'll innovate and cook a meal. And I like listening to podcasts while I'm doing something. It just gives my brain some space.”
How many unread emails do you have?
“ 116 unread. I am an inbox-zero person, so this is about as high anxiety as I get.”
What do you look for in an employee?
“Self-awareness. If you deeply know yourself, you have awareness about: What are your superpowers? What are your zones of genius? What are the areas that you’re not so good at?”
Best piece of advice you ever got?
“Lean into failure. I’m actively looking for ways to fail, like every day. If I can fail on something today instead of putting that off tomorrow, then I'm already ahead tomorrow because I already learned something today.”
Worst piece of advice you ever got?
“ You get a lot of advice as an entrepreneur. Everybody has an opinion. I try not to listen to bad advice.”
What does the term “girlboss” mean to you?
“I know we’re not there yet, but I wish we could get to a place where it didn’t have to be gendered. I really, really hate the word ‘mompreneur,’ and I’ve been labeled that before. I’m like, ‘Can I just be a parent and a founder?’ But I love the community. I love women being girls’ girls and lifting each other up. We need more of that.”
Ready to meet your new healthcare sidekick during pregnancy and postpartum? Get real context—tailored to your unique health journey—with Trellis Health.
*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
