Kelly Lacob calls herself a reluctant founder. Her career was already firmly planted in healthcare. She began in public and global health, then moved into medtech and diagnostics, leading product design and roadmap efforts at companies building some of the most advanced molecular technologies in the industry. At Mammoth Biosciences, she worked on CRISPR-based diagnostics. Earlier, she helped launch one of the first FDA cleared at-home PCR tests.
Founding a company was not part of the plan. Then two things happened at once. Her future cofounder, Jesus Ching, PhD, approached her with a technical vision for dramatically improving early detection in conditions where no strong screening standard exists today. At the same time, Kelly was navigating her mother’s transition to hospice care, due to a recurrence of ovarian cancer.
“I’d heard the Silicon Valley adage ‘Don’t become a startup founder unless you would feel unfulfilled doing anything else,” Kelly said. “That was the first time I felt the unrelenting need to start a company, specifically the company that would become Xella Health.
Kelly, Jesus, and their other cofounder, Adriana Dantas, a veteran from Becton Dickinson and Roche Diagnostics, began mapping the future of women’s healthcare.
The Research Gap in Female Biology
Xella began by focusing on reproductive and gynecologic health, an area Kelly describes as profoundly under researched and underserved. For the team, menstrual fluid emerged as an obvious but overlooked signal.
At a basic level, it is closer to the biological source than peripheral blood, meaning biomarkers may appear sooner and at higher concentrations. Beyond that, menstrual fluid contains reproductive tissues and cervical secretions that are simply not accessible through standard blood draws.
Despite this, it has historically been ignored in clinical diagnostics. Part of that neglect stems from stigma. Menstrual blood has long been dismissed as messy or undesirable. Yet modern medicine already relies on fecal samples, saliva, and other non-sterile specimens. More than half the population menstruates regularly. The issue was never viability. It was validation.
The scientific challenges were real. Menstrual fluid contains diverse microflora and bacterial content, which complicates biomarker isolation. RNA integrity is more difficult to preserve than in a controlled blood draw. Sample collection methods such as cups, tampons, and pads each presented tradeoffs between user adoption, comfort, and molecular quality.
Xella ultimately moved toward a swab-based collection approach designed to balance ease of use with high quality multi omic extraction. Over the past year, much of the company’s technical effort has focused on optimizing the interface between user experience and molecular fidelity.
For Kelly, that form factor challenge was not cosmetic. If the sample is not accessible to all women, including those with pelvic pain or cultural constraints, then the platform fails its mission.
A Systems Biology Approach to Women’s Health
Xella is not building a single biomarker test. The company is developing a platform level system that integrates multi omic biomarkers and models them through a systems biology lens. Instead of asking whether one signal is elevated or suppressed, the platform evaluates how signals interact and influence one another over time.
This requires significant computational infrastructure. The team is building mathematical models capable of mapping cause and effect relationships across molecular networks.
The vision is ambitious. Xella aims to enable screening and early detection across a broad range of conditions through an integrated biological understanding rather than fragmented diagnostics.
Kelly is clear that more data alone is not the answer. “Our goal was never to simply provide women or their clinicians with more data,” she said. “The goal is to turn biological insight into clinical action and improved outcomes.”
Beyond Diagnostics: An End-to-End Care Model
When asked whether Xella is a diagnostics company, a data company, or a healthcare platform, Kelly reframes the question.
Xella is a precision healthcare company for women. Diagnostics serve as the entry point, but the product extends beyond testing into interpretation, education, and care delivery.
The company is building an end-to-end ecosystem that integrates proprietary diagnostic panels, AI driven interpretation and longitudinal tracking, educational support, concierge style guidance, clinical decision support tools, and a telehealth practice built around defined clinical protocols.
The aim is to ensure women feel supported and equipped to act, whether that means lifestyle adjustments, functional medicine support, prescription therapies, referrals to specialists, imaging, or further interventions.
Kelly points to a recurring frustration among clinicians. Many are deeply committed to their patients but lack comprehensive, integrated data specific to female biology. Too often, patients hear some version of “I don’t know.” Xella is attempting to fill that gap for both patient and provider.
The Ideal Customer: Women With Unanswered Questions
Xella’s ideal user is not defined strictly by age or income. It is defined by intent. These are women who want to be participatory in their health journey. Many have already seen clinicians and undergone testing, yet still feel uncertain or unsupported.
Within that broader audience, the company is initially focusing on women navigating infertility and sub fertility, perimenopause and menopause, chronic gynecologic disorders, and gynecologic cancer risk identification and prevention.
With more than 10,000 women currently on the waitlist ahead of launch, demand suggests that many are actively searching for a more integrated approach.
“Navigating a hormonal life stage transition or a complex care condition is rarely a simple answer, or a simple fix,” said Kelly. “The women we speak with want to understand what’s happening in their bodies, the ‘why,’ the ‘what’s next,’ and then to have a knowledgeable and empathetic expert support them throughout that journey. That’s what Xella offers.”
Building Toward a Healthcare Operating System
Looking ahead, Kelly sees healthcare moving toward what many describe as a healthcare operating system. Molecular diagnostics, wearables, imaging, clinical records, and longitudinal data will converge into unified environments where artificial intelligence helps synthesize complexity.
Xella intends to participate in that shift. The company envisions becoming a hub that connects women to broader care networks including nutritionists, pelvic floor therapists, genetic counselors, imaging centers, and specialists. Rather than replacing existing providers, Xella aims to coordinate them and provide a structured biological foundation beneath their work.
In Kelly’s view, the enemy is not today’s doctors, who are well-intending. It is the status quo of fragmented, reactive care in a domain that has historically lacked investment and integration.
From Pre Seed to Launch
Xella raised a $3.7 million pre seed round at the end of last year and is finalizing product development ahead of a spring launch. A second tier product rollout is planned for the summer.
The team is currently focused on completing diagnostic panel optimization, building out the digital reporting and interpretation ecosystem, training clinicians within its telehealth practice, designing a seamless and high quality user experience, and piloting integrations with both brick and mortar and virtual care practices.
If Xella succeeds, it will not simply introduce a new test. It will help define a new category in precision healthcare for women, one where answers arrive earlier, data is integrated rather than isolated, and care is built around the biology that has too often been overlooked.
