Medical devices & diagnostics · Maternal and infant nutrition

BBy

A New York startup that dries donor breast milk into a shelf-stable powder for hospital NICUs, built to keep the milk’s immune properties intact for up to six months.

The milk shift

In a neonatal intensive care unit, donor breast milk is frozen. Feeding a baby means thawing it first, and that takes hours. “There’s a huge opportunity here to change the ‘milk shift,’” Vansh Langer, BBy’s CEO, told TechCrunch in 2023. “If nothing else, It’s a $12 billion annual labor play in the United States and beyond.”

The milk shift is the name Langer gave to the daily routine: a nurse, sometimes a whole shift’s worth of time, watching a water bath so frozen milk doesn’t curdle before feeding. “Labor hours are completely wasted every day, highly skilled labor that’s essentially watching a water bath to make sure that the milk doesn’t curdle,” Langer told Crunchbase News.

BBy’s answer is a device that turns the milk into powder instead. Technicians collect frozen donor milk every two weeks, defrost it at a regional facility, and run it through what the company calls a two-factor laser paired with a commercial condenser. The laser tracks the milk’s weight and temperature as it moves into a vacuum and adjusts the rate so the milk stays, in Langer’s words, in the bioactive zone. What comes out is a fine powder, packed into aluminum packets, shipped back to the hospital, and reconstituted with water at the bedside.

Why powder, and why not just dehydrate it

Plain dehydration sterilizes milk and destroys the antibodies that make breast milk more than a nutrition source. A 2016 peer-reviewed study on spray and freeze drying of human milk, coauthored by Blanca Rosa Aguilar-Uscanga years before BBy existed, found that ordinary spray drying left only about 38 percent of IgA intact, while freeze drying at a lower plate temperature preserved closer to 75 to 80 percent of IgA, IgG and IgM. That tradeoff is the exact problem BBy says its algorithm solves, by keeping the milk inside a narrow temperature and moisture window rather than sterilizing it outright.

“This technology is a game changer for hospitals. Clinical data confirms that the nutrition for these infants is every bit as good and as easy to digest as breast milk that has never been condensed,” Aguilar Uscanga, BBy’s head of science, said in the company’s 2023 funding announcement. “Our process proudly keeps breast milk, breast milk. Nothing added and nothing removed.”

Two founders, a paper, and a hospital problem

Langer has described starting the company as a medical trainee who kept seeing the same wasted hours on the pediatrics floor, an observation multiple accounts place in his first year of residency, 2016. He then found a paper Aguilar Uscanga had written on the difficulty of powdering human milk without losing its bioactive elements, and the two began working together. TechCrunch reported that Langer started the company in 2015. Crunchbase lists a founding date of January 26, 2017, and both Femtech Insider and The Hustle describe the founding as 2017. The company’s own materials do not state a founding year.

Aguilar Uscanga earned her PhD in bioengineering and food science through the University of Guadalajara and CUCEI, and the pair say they have more than 50 published works between them. Langer is a physician with degrees from Windsor University and the University of Chicago. BBy’s research facility is in Guadalajara, Mexico, where Aguilar Uscanga is based.

Bootstrapped for seven years, then a seed round

BBy operated without outside capital for years before raising its first announced round. “If you think of the last 70 years of hospital innovation, everything has changed in the hospital except for the way we store breast milk,” Langer said in a 2023 Crunchbase News interview.

In May 2023, after Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch, BBy announced $3 million in seed funding led by Pioneer Fund, with Y Combinator, 7G Bioventures, Cathexis Ventures and more than $500,000 from YC alumni angels also participating. The company said it ran eight regional facilities near 17 client hospitals in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Texas, each processing about ten gallons of milk twice a day. New Atlas, an independent outlet, described that footprint as “a small-scale pilot project.”

By 2024, the company’s public description had shifted geography: The Hustle reported the technology “is being used in 20 hospitals in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut,” and BBy’s Y Combinator page, current as of this writing, says the same thing: “over 20 hospitals in the New York Tri-State.” Massachusetts and Texas do not appear in the newer description, and no source explains the change.

The business model

Langer told The Hustle that BBy prices contracts as a share of the money it saves a hospital, estimating savings from NICU nursing headcount and keeping roughly 10 percent as its fee. “We found that we can save hospitals millions of dollars a month,” he said. In 2023, Langer told TechCrunch that BBy was averaging about $800,000 a month in revenue, approaching $10 million annualized. That figure has not been independently verified and no later revenue figure has been reported.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: BBy has real, credible science under it, and a real reported hospital footprint and seed round. What is missing is any independent regulatory, trial or financial record naming BBy directly. Every FDA, clinical and funding claim here traces back to the company or to reporters relaying what it said.

What to watch

• Whether BBy discloses its FDA classification in writing, or whether a state milk bank or tissue license applies to its facilities.
• A named hospital customer or a published study of the BBy device itself, not just the underlying drying science.
• Whether an SEC Form D or other funding record ever appears for the 2023 seed round.
• An explanation for the shift in reported hospital states, from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Texas in 2023 to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from 2024 on.

In their words

Related companies

• Brown Foods: Similar focus. A Boston and India company growing bovine mammary cells in bioreactors to make whole cow milk, and now saying it has done the same with human milk
• Matrubials: Similar focus. A UC Davis spin-out turning antimicrobial peptides found in human milk into a topical drug for bacterial vaginosis
• Kilobaser: Also in Medical Devices. A Graz, Austria company that built a benchtop machine for printing short DNA and RNA strands in a lab, instead of ordering them from a central supplier
• NearWave: Also in Medical Devices. A handheld near infrared scanner built to tell an oncologist within a week whether chemotherapy is working on a breast tumor

Sources

1. IndependentBBy device turns breast milk into powder, helps NICU nurses avoid lengthy ‘milk shift’TechCrunch, Christine Hall · May 25, 2023
2. IndependentPowdered Breast Milk Startups Are A Thing And This One Just Grabbed $3M In FundingCrunchbase News, Keerthi Vedantam · May 25, 2023
3. Independent“Game-changing” BBy tech keeps essential nutrients in powdered breast milkNew Atlas, Ben Coxworth · May 25, 2023
4. IndependentNew York-based BBy Raises $3M in Seed Funding to Reinvent Breast Milk Management in HospitalsFemtech Insider · May 29, 2023
5. IndependentGot Milk? This Healthtech Startup Makes Powdered Breast Milk for Vulnerable BabiesThe Hustle, Sara Friedman · Apr 7, 2024
6. IndependentBBy creates first condensed-to-powder breast milk, announces seed fundingResearch & Development World, Heather Hall · May 25, 2023
7. Public recordSpray and freeze drying of human milk on the retention of immunoglobulins (IgA, IgG, IgM), Castro-Albarrán, Aguilar-Uscanga, et al.Drying Technology · 2016
8. IndependentBBy, Inc. company profileCrunchbase · archived Nov 30, 2023
9. CompanyBBy Creates First Condensed-to-Powder Breast Milk, Maintaining All Bioactive and Immune Factors; Announces Seed FundingYahoo Finance / ACCESSWIRE · May 25, 2023
10. CompanyBBy company pageY Combinator, accessed Sep 25, 2026
11. CompanyBBy, Inc. profileGust, accessed Sep 25, 2026
12. CompanyBBy website, home, milk, mission and about pagesbbyworld.com, accessed Sep 25, 2026