For millions of women, perimenopause can feel like an isolating experience, one marked by questions, unexpected symptoms and too few trusted places to turn for support. That's the gap that Perry — an AgeTech Collaborative™ (ATC) startup participant — seeks to close with its platform that combines inclusive education, empathetic community and support resources, both to help women navigate the perimenopause journey and to educate healthcare professionals about effective treatments.
We spoke with Laura Okafor, Perry’s CEO and Co-Founder, about the inspiration behind Perry, the evolving conversation around the “gray zone” of perimenopause, and the company’s work with partners such as the Department of Veterans Affairs.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What is Perry all about?
Perry is a holistic education platform for perimenopause. We started out as a community platform for women in perimenopause to support them through knowledge, education and community. Over the last six years, we have evolved into both a community app for women and an educational platform for health professionals to learn more about perimenopause and women’s health.
What inspired you to concentrate specifically on perimenopause?
We focus primarily on perimenopause because for many women, it’s one of life’s most misunderstood phases. Reaching menopause means that a woman is out of that “fertility zone.” And although women experiencing perimenopause can still get pregnant, their hormones may already be going haywire, their sleep may be getting worse, their skin may be changing — they may even get acne like they had when they were teenagers! Perimenopause can start in your late 30s or early 40s, so many women don’t even recognize it, because they think menopause is for “older women.”
Now that we’re more established, we are extending our education to cover different phases across the lifespan— to post-menopausal years, for example, but also to the fertile time pre-menopause.
Besides expanding your scope beyond perimenopause, you are evolving your audience from everyday women to medical professionals. What prompted that focus on a new audience?
We have around 200,000 women on the platform. Through all the interviews and conversations we’ve had with them, we’ve learned that there is widespread disappointment in the healthcare system and the level of knowledge that clinicians typically have about women’s health in perimenopause. They’re frustrated that their doctors don’t know about the latest research on hormone therapy, for example.
We realized we can’t address the gap in perimenopause care only by educating women; we needed to educate healthcare providers as well. We take the incredible insights from the lived experiences in our community and use those to prepare training courses for health professionals.
Just as important, we’ve learned that women want to have a multifaceted support system of professionals who are informed about perimenopause, including not just OB-GYNs and internists, but also specialists like dietitians, pelvic floor specialists and psychologists. As a result, we want to make sure that we train a range of professionals who can support women in perimenopause. Ultimately, our goal is not just to educate, but to connect the women who are experiencing symptoms with the professionals that we’ve trained. We’ve already started doing that: We published a directory where women have access to all the different specialists that have been taking our training.
How does the Perry platform work?
We have a blog on our website and a very big social media presence; most women find us through those channels, and then they download our app. The app has some features that require a subscription — which is quite low — but the community feature in the app is free. That community support feature of the app really shines: A woman can get on there and post things like, “My hair is thinning out. Who else is experiencing this?” Then other women can respond.
This element of emotional support helps women feel like they are not alone in this journey — they discover that other women are going through similar changes. This is especially important because conversations about perimenopause still have a stigma attached to them.
That’s interesting, as it seems like the stigma around menopause has been somewhat reduced in recent years. Is that not the case for perimenopause?
When we started Perry, nobody was speaking out about menopause or perimenopause. The conversation around menopause has evolved rapidly over the past few years, but I think we’re in a kind of echo chamber. There are still a lot of women who feel left out of the conversation; we see it in our app every day — women who don’t feel comfortable bringing it up with their boss or their partner.
There’s a cultural element, too: For women from a Latino or South Asian background, for example, there are different ways to discuss aging and women’s bodies. So I would not generalize and say that it’s no longer taboo, and I want to be careful to not leave some women behind. Many still feel embarrassed to address these things with their family or with people in their workplace.
What was the catalyst for founding the company?
I’m in my early 40s, and I have three small children. After I had my babies, I felt “off,” my sleep was poor and my anxiety was through the roof, and I wondered, “Will this ever change?”
Then I read about perimenopause. It seemed weird to me that this phase of a woman's life has always been positioned as black-and-white: You’re young and in your fertile years, or you’re old and you’re in menopause. But there’s a gray zone in between, which we now have a name for: perimenopause. But there’s not enough knowledge out there about it. That’s why I founded Perry, because I wanted to shine a light on this continuum of women’s health.
This is such an important time in a woman’s life, and it can also be a real opportunity for women to take care of their health in various ways, such as learning about bone health and heart health. So perimenopause doesn’t have to be a dark, negative time; it can be a fruitful time to check in and inform yourself about how you can live healthier for a longer time.
You’ve been doing work with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Can you tell us about that?
A group at the VA in Saint Louis reached out to us to train their health coaches with our courses, and now we’re an official vendor for them. They use our accredited health training courses to educate their medical personnel, and now their health coaches are in a position to have better conversations with and support their female midlife veterans, which I think is very powerful.
We also work closely with the National Menopause Foundation, and we founded Perimenopause Awareness Month to help get the word out about perimenopause.
What are some benefits you’ve experienced being part of the AgeTech Collaborative?
When we were getting started — especially as a European company — we were looking for a partner in the U.S. to get feedback on our product and to become part of a network. During the ATC Accelerator, we were able to get patient feedback on our app, and we also got great feedback on our advertising and on our monetization model, all of which was extremely helpful. And being part of the ATC ecosystem and AARP more generally gives us a lot of credibility in the space.
We also get terrific ongoing support. It has given us great exposure at high-stakes conferences like CES and HLTH, and I can just pick up the phone and talk with our ATC account manager, who is always there to help us think through things and help us expand our network.
What does the next year have in store for Perry?
Our biggest priority is to build out Perry Academy, which is like a Netflix library of accredited courses. We invite speakers to Perry Academy every two weeks or so to provide education. For example, we just had a speaker who shared best practices for consulting with women in perimenopause who have also experienced trauma. There are so many opportunities for education, and we plan to expand those, including to post-menopause topics, in the coming months.
Plus, this year we will have our first in-person event, the Perimenopause Symposium in Baltimore. It will be a one-day CME training for health professionals across different specialties, and we’re very much looking forward to that. That’s a step to our bigger goal over the next two years, to become the largest women’s health medical education platform to bring more targeted education to health professionals across specialties focused on women’s health.
You can learn more about the Perry Academy and Perry’s upcoming Perimenopause Symposium on their website.
#StartupSpotlight