Oya: bettering Brazilian women's health
Oya is building a full-stack partner for women's health.
Biography
Stephanie von Staa Toledo is the founder of Oya Care, a women’s health startup. Oya provides online and in-person services related to gynecology and fertility. Operating in Brazil, Oya raised a $3M seed round in 2022.
In Q1 2025, Oya made R$ 3.6M in gross revenue (~USD $600K), a 63% jump from the previous quarter.
Prior to Oya, worked at McKinsey, BNP Paribas and Northern Swan Holdings, an investment firm focused on the legal cannabis industry.
What problem are you solving?
We’re helping women regain autonomy over their bodies by better understanding what’s happening to them.
For a woman, more clarity on topics of gynecology and fertility can be life-changing. A woman that’s in pain might self-medicate, whereas an endometriosis diagnosis would set her on an adequate medical path. A woman that’s unsure and worried about how long she’ll be fertile for might rush into a relationship.
My vision is for women to have autonomy over their lives, which is impossible if they don’t first have autonomy over their bodies.
What did your MVP look like and how did you muster up initial traction?
In the context of women’s health, the concept of a “minimum viable portfolio” makes more sense than a “minimum viable product”. We estimate that 80% of Brazilian women go to the doctor once a year. This is good for their health, but not a frequency on which you can build a company.
To increase the frequency with which women interact with Oya, we thus need to offer different services, which women might use throughout the year. This creates a healthier average ticket per patient. However, we can only offer services that complement each other, to avoid pushing patients into services they don’t need.
Fertility assessments were our first product, but they weren’t enough from a business standpoint. We then launched gynecology consultations, both online and in physical clinics. Today, most of our revenue comes from fertility procedures such as egg freezing.
Offering these services allows us to build comprehensive gynecological and fertility assessments for our patients, improving the way in which we can accompany them.
RO insights: breaking systemic sexism through fintech
Noh, a Brazilian fintech, has a similar mission to Oya but goes about it in a different way, by creating an “egalitarian” joint bank account for couples. Here’s how Ana Zucato, Noh’s founder, explains:
“In traditional Brazilian banks, most joint accounts have an “owner” and a “beneficiary”. The beneficiary, as its name suggests, has restricted access to the account’s functionalities. For certain actions, the beneficiary has to ask the owner for permission. In the case of heterosexual couples, women often held the “beneficiary” title. Many find this setup egregiously unadapted to our times.
That’s for the infrastructure part. The user experience part of joint accounts was also horrendous: my husband and I used to track our joint expenses on Excel, trying to parse them together fairly at the end of the month…
The need for a modern, egalitarian joint account app for Brazilian couples stuck out like a sore thumb.”
Excerpt from Noh: banking couples in Brazil, originally published in The Realistic Optimist
What age range of patients do you serve?
We want to serve a broad age range, from 14 to 60. We’ve just added obstetricians to our team, to help patients with their pregnancy and childbirth journey. We’re also adding services related to menopause. Next year, we’d like to focus on serving teenagers.
The services you offer require heavy investment (doctors, clinics…). What percentage of these costs have you internalized versus outsourced?