We’re excited to welcome 10 innovative, passionate startup leaders to the 2026 WBL Fellows cohort! Learn about them and their companies below.
COO, Alaffia Health
Adun Akanni is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Alaffia Health, where she leads operations and execution for the company’s AI-powered platform that helps health plans prevent and recover improper payments. With a mission to eliminate the billions of dollars lost annually to fraud, waste, and abuse, Adun drives Alaffia’s focus on delivering measurable value, combining AI with clinical and coding expertise to transform how health plans manage claims.
Adun brings over a decade of experience in revenue cycle management, where she led complex billing and auditing operations and implemented process improvements that significantly improved collections, reduced denials, and accelerated payment cycles.
She holds a Master of Public Health in Health Policy and Management, along with professional credentials as a Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Professional Coder (CPC), and Certified Professional Biller (CPB), a combination that gives her fluency across the clinical, operational, and policy dimensions of health plan administration.
CEO and Co-Founder, Zula Therapeutics
Dawn Bardot, PhD, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Zula Therapeutics, developing next-generation, biomarker-guided leptin therapies for anorexia nervosa, the deadliest psychiatric illness and one with no approved drug.
Dawn brings more than 20 years of experience taking regulated medical products from concept through global commercialization. She most recently served as General Manager at Abiomed (Johnson & Johnson), leading a $60M global business and scaling an FDA-approved connected-device platform, including its first AI-enabled FDA submission, from proof of concept to more than 2,600 hospitals across the US, Europe, and Japan. Earlier, she held leadership roles at Medtronic and helped launch NESTcc, an FDA-funded coordinating center that supports real-world evidence generation for medical device regulation. She holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington.
Zula Therapeutics is developing the first medicine for anorexia nervosa, the deadliest psychiatric disease and one that still has no approved drug. Care today relies almost entirely on refeeding and behavioral therapy, which fail a large share of patients and rank among the most expensive treatments in behavioral health.
Zula’s core insight is that a measurable hormone deficiency identifies the patients most likely to respond. In severe anorexia, the loss of body fat collapses leptin, the hormone that signals to the brain that the body has enough energy. A simple blood test identifies patients in whom that deficiency is clinically significant, primarily adolescent and young adult women. European clinicians treating these patients off-label with an approved leptin therapy have already documented rapid relief of neuropsychiatric symptoms within days. Zula holds the exclusive license to the foundational intellectual property for this leptin-based treatment.
Co-Founder, Quilt Health
Jazmine Coleman is a healthcare strategist, operator, and entrepreneur whose career spans life sciences, payer innovation, and digital health. Drawing from her upbringing at the intersection of community health and entrepreneurship, Jazmine’s work is grounded in the belief that innovative healthcare solutions can and must reach the communities that need them most.
Prior to co-founding Quilt Health, she held leadership roles at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Myriad Women’s Health, and Johnson & Johnson, advancing access to healthcare innovation across clinical, commercial, and community settings. Jazmine holds an Executive MBA from Suffolk University, a Master’s in Management from Wake Forest University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Mandarin Chinese from Hamilton College.
Quilt Health is a digital health company dedicated to accelerating access to transformative care for people living with complex chronic conditions. Quilt partners with clinical centers of excellence and community organizations to build new, technology-enabled care models, creating a network of organizations committed to making exceptional care, innovative treatments, and supportive communities accessible to those in need. The goal: longer, healthier lives, lived with dignity. Founded in 2024, Quilt Health is initially focused on sickle cell disease, the most common rare disease in the United States.
CEO and Founder, Mae Health, Inc.
Maya Hardigan is the founder and CEO of Mae, a maternal health solution built with the purpose of expanding access to doula support and other critical resources known to improve outcomes. Prior to founding Mae, Maya spent 15 years in healthcare with a primary focus on building and scaling technologies and innovations to engage, inform, and optimize care for patients. Maya holds a Bachelor’s degree from Duke University and an MBA from Columbia Business School. She is the proud mama of three little girls and resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Mae improves the pregnancy journey for everyone involved — mamas, doulas, and health plans — through digital innovation and human-centered support. We connect mamas and their families with trusted, insurance-covered doulas, risk-tracking, and education for personalized support from pregnancy through postpartum. We remove administrative burdens so doulas can focus on support, not paperwork. And we help health plans reduce costs and disparities through real-time insights, care coordination, and high-impact community-based doula support for their members. Together, we’re making maternal health more accessible and equitable.
CEO and Founder, Octin Health
Dr. Meghana Helder is a Mayo Clinic-trained cardiothoracic surgeon and Founder & CEO of Octin Health, a medical device company developing technologies to improve outcomes in complex aortic surgery. Throughout her career, she has combined clinical excellence with a passion for innovation, building new surgical programs while identifying opportunities to solve unmet challenges in cardiovascular care.
As both a practicing surgeon and entrepreneur, Meghana leads Octin from concept through product development, fundraising, regulatory strategy, and commercialization. Her mission is to transform how surgeons care for patients with life-threatening aortic disease while demonstrating that physician-led innovation can meaningfully improve healthcare. As a first-generation immigrant and founder, she is passionate about expanding opportunities for future physician entrepreneurs and increasing representation of women in medical technology leadership.
Octin Health is a surgeon-founded medical device company developing innovative technologies for open aortic surgery. Our lead technology, the Elika™ Device, is a patented enabling tool, designed to maintain continuous blood flow to the brain and body during complex aortic procedures, with the goal of making one of cardiac surgery’s highest-risk operations safer and more reproducible.
Our vision is to build a company that advances the future of cardiovascular surgery through surgeon-driven innovation, collaboration, and technologies that improve care for patients around the world.
CEO and Co-Founder, Cerula Care
Supriya Laknidhi, CEO and Co-Founder of Cerula Care, has spent 20 years in healthcare in product leadership, strategy, and COO roles at Aetna/CVS, Optum, BCG, and Bend Health (a pediatric/adolescent behavioral health startup). Through personal and professional experience, she has seen firsthand the impact of a challenging health condition on mental health, and the gap that exists in our current system — an insight that led her to found Cerula Care.
Supriya lives in northern CT with her husband, two children (ages 12 and 10), and her dog. When she can find the time, she loves a good run or a good book!
Cerula Care is a psychosocial care company that seamlessly integrates with oncology practices and health systems through the collaborative care model. Nearly 80% of patients with cancer experience unmet behavioral health needs — including anxiety, depression, and isolation — that worsen outcomes and increase hospitalizations.
Cerula Care embeds a dedicated team of psycho-oncology specialists (psychiatrists, therapists, care managers) directly into oncology programs, working in concert with the oncology team to provide personalized, cancer-specific support. The model unlocks reimbursement codes for the oncology practice or health system. Early clinical results show statistically significant improvements in anxiety and depression and improvements in oncology treatment adherence within just one month in care.
CEO, TheraMotive
Dr. Lola Omishore is building a new care delivery model in physical therapy by moving clinics, not patients. As a Doctor of Physical Therapy, Board-Certified Orthopedic Specialist, Certified Athletic Trainer, and published researcher, she has spent a decade treating elite athletes, young children, stroke survivors, and older adults. Working in sports medicine gave her a front-row seat to what healthcare looks like when exceptional care is available on demand. Her experience also revealed that most people will never get to experience that level of access. She created TheraMotive to change that.
TheraMotive is the mobility platform that lets health organizations share and deploy rehab clinics anywhere. Instead of asking health organizations to build expensive rehab clinics, TheraMotive makes entire clinics portable, deployable, and ready to move according to demand.
TheraMotive is the operating system for decentralized outpatient rehab. We help health enterprises expand access without building, staffing, or managing additional clinics through a shared network of portable rehab clinics dispatched wherever demand exists. Our three-sided model solves a problem for the entire rehabilitation market: patients receive care within their own communities, enterprises expand their reach without fixed overhead, and clinicians gain a path to ownership with enterprise demand already built in. We’re flipping the care delivery model by moving clinics, not patients.
CEO and Co-Founder, Perfecting Peds
Jena Quinn, PharmD, BCPPS is the CEO and Co-Founder of Perfecting Peds, a pediatric clinical pharmacy company transforming care for children with complex medical needs through pharmacist-led comprehensive medication management. A board-certified pediatric pharmacy specialist, Dr. Quinn has dedicated her career to advancing pediatric medication safety and improving outcomes for medically complex children. She completed postgraduate training at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Cooper University Health Care and has extensive experience in pediatric critical care, emergency medicine, and ambulatory care.
Under her leadership, Perfecting Peds partners with health plans and healthcare organizations nationwide to embed pediatric pharmacists into care teams, helping reduce medication-related problems, improve adherence, prevent hospitalizations, and lower healthcare costs. The company’s innovative model has demonstrated measurable clinical and financial outcomes while improving the lives of children and their families.
Perfecting Peds is a pediatric clinical pharmacy company partnering with health plans and healthcare organizations to improve outcomes for children with complex medical needs.
Through a technology-enabled, value-based care model, Perfecting Peds delivers measurable clinical and financial outcomes, including reduced healthcare utilization, lower total cost of care, and high provider acceptance of pharmacist recommendations. By embedding pediatric medication experts upstream in the care journey, we help health plans improve quality, enhance the member experience, and ensure children receive the right medication, at the right dose, at the right time. Our mission is simple: every child deserves a pediatric medication expert dedicated to helping them achieve the best possible health outcomes.
President and Co-Founder, Atlas Oncology Partners
Kate Roberts is President of Atlas Oncology Partners, a company she led the incubation of during her time as a Principal on Rubicon Founders’ investment team. Kate is accountable for the strategic direction and ongoing operations of Atlas. Kate’s passion and experience lie at the intersection of consumerism, technology, and healthcare.
Before joining Atlas, Kate developed a track record of leading incubations of new companies and solutions. At Rubicon Founders, Kate specialized in value-based and provider-enablement concepts including those in cardiology, post-acute, and clinical research. Prior to Rubicon, Kate served as VP of Growth for Cohere Health and led Haven Healthcare’s advanced primary care efforts. Before that, she worked at Strategy& (formerly Booz and Company) as a consultant to senior executives of health systems and health plans.
Kate is a graduate of the University of Southern California, MIT Sloan, and the Harvard Kennedy School. She lives in Manhattan Beach, CA with her husband Chris and their children, William and Owen, and dog Daisy.
Atlas Oncology Partners exists to deliver the cancer care we all want and deserve. Founded by oncologists, for oncologists, Atlas embeds directly alongside medical oncology practices, bringing incremental staff, tools, and novel reimbursement contracts to strengthen how they deliver whole-person, whole-journey care. Atlas provides longitudinal, supportive care to patients across every cancer type and every phase of the journey — from active treatment through surveillance and end of life. The result is better outcomes and a better experience for patients, greater autonomy for oncology providers, and measurable savings for the system. It’s care built to work better for everyone, because it was designed that way from the start.
CEO, SeraGene Therapeutics
Amy W Strilchuk has 6+ years’ experience working with interdisciplinary teams of researchers and clinicians to advance the development of RNA therapeutics for bleeding disorders.
Amy is the inventor of SeraGene’s two lead assets and has published her work in high-impact journals including Blood and Science Translational Medicine. She has secured millions of dollars of research funding from governmental sources, investment groups, and industry partners to support development of SeraGene’s pipeline.
Patients on lifelong treatments deserve a life well-lived. SeraGene Therapeutics is a women-led biotechnology company focused on discovering first-in-class therapies for chronic disease. Founded by scientists from leading blood research institutions, SeraGene harnesses advanced siRNA technologies to unlock targets inaccessible by other drug modalities. Our mission is to provide long-lasting and low-burden prophylaxis in areas of high unmet need, with a particular focus on women’s health.