Meet the rising stars under 40 working on startups that change your relationship with healthcare

Laraki and Bhat are two of the cofounders behind Color, a genetics testing company that wants to help people get a better sense of their genetic risk for cancer and heart conditions. The company, based in Burlingame, California, has raised $112 million.

Color's tests range in price from $99 to $349, with the higher price offering a combination test designed to tell you about your risk for both hereditary heart conditions and cancer risk.

Bhat has been interested in biology since he was a child. "As a kid my favorite toys were not one but two different kinds of microscopes," he said. Now a founding engineer at Color, Bhat is working to bring technology tools like software and automation to healthcare and biology.

Laraki, Color's CEO, spent much of his career at Google and Twitter before starting Color. His background in tech has led him to think about making the experience of taking the tests easier, either through a lower price than other genetics tests or by working with employers to make it more accessible to their employees.

"Every bit of friction causes you to lose people," Laraki said.

Cheek, a Harvard Business School graduate who was working in strategy at the money-transfer company MoneyGram, hadn't expected to start a healthcare company. "I couldn't have imagined starting a company in this space," she said.

But after paying thousands for lab testing while at MoneyGram, she started EverlyWell, an Austin, Texas-based company that sells at-home diagnostic tests for sexually transmitted diseases, fertility, and food sensitivity. The tests are run at traditional blood-testing labs. What's different about the process is the price tag.

EverlyWell targets the growing group of people who are on high-deductible plans that often leave them on the hook for covering thousands of dollars' worth of healthcare before their insurance kicks in. The three-year-old company has tests ranging in cost from $49 to $399 that patients can apply health savings accounts and flexible savings account dollars toward.

The idea is to have lab testing be as easy to access as acquiring an over-the-counter drug like Tylenol.

Greenfield didn't have braces growing up. As an adult he started learning about clear aligners that could straighten his teeth, but the price astounded him. So he created Candid with the goal of lowering costs and increasing access to oral health.

Cosgrove had been working in the Los Angeles and New York City startup scenes when a college friend introduced her to Greenfield. With a background in hospitality, Cosgrove hopped onboard as Candid's head of product, working with the business and engineering teams to create and update products.

For $88 a month, Candid will ship clear aligners and impression kits directly to customers with remote diagnosis and treatment suggestion by an orthodontist. The company also opened its first Candid Studio in New York City, where it creates 3D models of customers' teeth that can be used to make aligners. The company recently launched a mobile app that lets patients check in orthodontists to monitor their progress.

"Over 90% of our customers would never pay the average price for in-office clear aligners," Greenfield said. "We're definitely expanding the market for folks and helping them get access to something they couldn't get before."

Berzin's interest in wellness dates back to her days training as a doctor at Columbia University and the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. After starting a company that provided a secure messaging platform for hospitals, Berzin began to think about how else the market for primary care, the basic level of healthcare you experience when you get an annual physical, could be disrupted.

"It seemed obvious to me to build a new system for primary care that not only re-operationalized medical care but also that incorporated tracking, and mental health," Berzin said. That’s why she started Parsley Health, a medical practice that has raised $10 million in funding.

Founded in 2016, Parsley Health has centers in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and is the only medical practice located in WeWork spaces. Parsley is focused on functional medicine, a type of practice that tries to take a more comprehensive, holistic approach at treating the underlying cause of a particular disease. For a monthly fee of $150 you get not just primary-care visits but nutrition plans and supplement regimens along with more in-depth genetics and microbiome testing.

In January 2015, Kinariwala woke up with a terrible headache. The headache and the tedious trek to get medication turned into a brainstorm for an idea to ease the pain of the pharmacy experience.

Kinariwala was an investor for Perry Capital at the time, focusing on the health and technology sector. He had been thinking a lot about how businesses with physical shops were starting to go digital and began the journey to create a modernized, personable pharmacy brand, Capsule, in May 2015 with a friend named Sonia Patel.

The New York City-based company offers delivery services for prescriptions throughout the city and its five boroughs. Prescriptions are meant to be delivered within two hours, and through the app customers can chat or text with a pharmacist for advice about their medication.

Kao and Lu grew up in California raised by immigrant parents. They met during their first week at Stanford University and knew from the get-go that they worked well together. After undergraduate, Kao ventured into business development in the healthcare space, while Lu went to medical school at the Baylor College of Medicine. The decision to start Helix, a DNA testing company, brought them together again.

"Your genome should be yours," Kao said. "It should be portable, it should be useful. It should be your choice in what you want to know." Helix was founded on that idea.

Often dubbed the "app store of genetics," Helix collects genetic samples, storing that data and working with partners that interpret that genetic data in a way that is insightful for the consumer, such as personalized health, nutrition, and ancestry. Through Helix, you send in one spit sample that can then be analyzed for different reports based on that person's interests over time. The San Carlos, California-based Helix in March raised a $200 million series B financing round.

Recently, Helix became involved in a project called Healthy Nevada in which it sequenced 40,000 people and combined that with electronic health records and environmental data in the first-of-their-kind studies about population health.

Parker had grown up in and around pharmacies. He attended pharmacy school in Boston, where he developed a deep interest in design and technology. It was at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Hacking Medicine that he met Cohen.

At Hacking Medicine in late 2012, the pair pitched the idea for PillPack, a digital pharmacy, won the competition, and started the company shortly after.

PillPack, based in Boston, simplifies the process of managing medications for customers who take upward of five pills a day. It sorts, packages, labels, and delivers the medication to the customer once a month and, in conjunction, offers a mobile app that can help you keep track of your pills and send you reminders.

PillPack was acquired in late June by the e-commerce giant Amazon.

Richman's entrepreneurial career got its start in an unlikely place: Chile. She was studying in England at the time, and the offer of a visa and funding to start a company in the South American country was enticing. It was there that she met her cofounder, Zachary Apte, who was working on a doctorate through the University of California at San Francisco in biophysics. The two were fascinated with a new field of biology known as the microbiome.

So they started uBiome, a company that sells tests that sequence the bugs that live in us. With that information, the San Francisco-based uBiome can figure out what's going on in your microbiome, either for fun or for medical purposes. For example, the company's SmartJane test looks at the vaginal microbiome to test for sexually transmitted diseases as well as chronic vaginal infections.

Unlike your genome, the genetic information you're born with, the microbiome can change over time. It offers the possibility that by changing up diet or other factors, you may be able to get your microbes back to a healthy state.

For Reitano, the CEO of the New York-based men's health startup Roman, the focus of his company is very personal. Knowing a patient has erectile dysfunction can help doctors better check for other health concerns such as diabetes or heart disease. It's something Reitano refers to as a "check-engine light." In Reitano's case, erectile dysfunction signaled a heart condition.

It's personal too for Reitano's two cofounders, Schutz and Rahmanian, who watched their wives go though doctor's visits upon doctor's visits throughout pregnancy. When it came to their own health, it wasn't something they spent much time thinking about.

The three met while Reitano and Rahmanian were working at Prehype, a venture development firm that works with corporations to create startups. Schutz had been working for Bark & Co., the company behind Barkbox, which happened to be in the same building. The three put their heads together and realized that their experiences with men's healthcare could be turned into a startup.

Roman, which launched in November with $3 million in funding, has both a telemedicine practice and a pharmacy to distribute medications specifically for erectile dysfunction, such as Viagra and Cialis. The company hopes to expand beyond erectile dysfunction to treating other health conditions the "check-engine light" alerts Roman users to.

"One thing we're excited to do is apply best practices from e-commerce into healthcare," Schutz said.

As a college student, Wu wasn't exactly sure what she wanted to do after graduation. But while in graduate school at Stanford University, she crossed paths with Serge Saxonov and Brian Naughton, two of the founding scientists at 23andMe, a company now known for its consumer genetics tests. When Wu heard about their goal of bringing genetic data to people, it resonated with her.

After graduating in 2009, she joined the Mountain View-based 23andMe, first focused on curating research and information that had already been published and blogging about it for 23andMe's website. Now almost a decade later, she is the director of product science and is responsible for the health reports 23andMe provides to its users.

"I think a central theme of why I've been at 23andMe is the opportunity to bring science to the masses and make it relevant," Wu said.