Consumer health & wellness · Pelvic floor

Liv Labs

A Y Combinator company that spent $2.5 million in federal grants on a prescription-free treatment for urinary leakage, closed its pivotal trial after seven patients, and now sells a silicone spring its own FAQ says treats nothing.

Seven women

The registry entry for NCT05611970 is short, and the numbers inside it are small. Seven women with diagnosed stress urinary incontinence enrolled. Four finished. The study closed on April 9, 2024, and the sponsor gave two words for why: “Management decision.”

That was the pivotal trial for the Pippa Fitness Pessary, a soft, reusable silicone device Liv Labs had been building since 2017 and that the National Institutes of Health had paid about $2.2 million to develop. Sites were listed at two Northwestern Medicine urogynecology clinics near Chicago and at Ohio State University Medical Center. The principal investigator was the company chief executive, Melody Roberts.

Results were posted anyway, which many abandoned device studies never bother to do. Three of the four evaluable participants hit the primary endpoint, a reduction of more than half in leakage by pad weight or by daily episodes at home. No deaths, no serious adverse events, three minor ones. The record carries its own caveat in a single sentence: “Early termination led to a very small number of subjects analyzed.”

A condition nobody brings up

Stress urinary incontinence is leakage brought on by a laugh, a sneeze, a sprint. The NIH abstracts Liv Labs filed put the affected US population at 27 to 29 million women over 25. Kegels require months of correct, unsupervised repetition. Surgery carries surgical risk. Pessaries work, but a physician normally fits them, which means a referral, an exam and a conversation most women never start. Roberts says she tests that gap on herself: she sees a doctor every year and is never asked.

Liv Labs set out to skip the fitting. A symmetrical spring that compresses into a 10mm cylinder, loads into an applicator, expands inside the vagina and presses the urethra through soft tissue, bought over the counter and reused at will. A sensible product idea. Also, by definition, a regulated medical device, and that is where the timeline went.

A designer and an operator

Carly Price invented it. She is a product designer with 25 years behind work for OXO, Casper, Walmart, Ford and Chase, and she lost pelvic floor strength after her second child. She tried therapy and a range of pessaries, filed a provisional patent in January 2017, then called someone to run the company.

That was Melody Roberts, who had met Price at Smart Design in 1998 and had since spent twelve years inside McDonald’s building restaurant and digital service platforms, then Panera. She took the job, moved the company through the Polsky Center incubator at the University of Chicago, won South Side Pitch in 2018, and got into Y Combinator in 2021. “Fast forward to today, I lead Liv Labs, where we’re on mission to make continence self-care popular,” she told the 2024 graduating class at the Institute of Design, her own alma mater.

The grant years

Investors were hard to find. Roberts told the Polsky Center in 2021 that it had been difficult to interest anyone in a direct-to-consumer technology that still had to clear a medical device pathway. The company had raised “over $200,000 from friends and family” and was planning a pre-seed round.

So it raised from the government. NICHD awarded a Direct Phase II SBIR in April 2021, worth $951,491 in year one and $722,496 in year two. NSF added $255,078 in January 2022 for coaching software. In July 2024 NICHD added a Phase IIB continuation of $563,008, on an application the company said earned “the highest possible overall impact score: a perfect 10.” Federal awards on record total $2,492,073.

The turn

The July 2024 release announcing that continuation said the money would fund nonclinical testing “in support of 510(K) premarket submission to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)” and that it built on clinical research demonstrating ease of use and effectiveness. The pivotal trial had been closed for three months. The release did not mention that.

What reached the market was not the pessary. In June 2025 Liv Labs ran a Kickstarter for the Pippa Resistance Spring, a fitness accessory, and raised $29,069 from 209 backers against a $7,268 goal. First orders shipped that October, the company says, and Fast Company named Pippa an Innovation by Design honoree in September. Today the store sells kits from $119 to $179, an applicator, a bandana and coaching.

The Kickstarter FAQ puts it without hedging. The spring “does not treat any medical condition or pelvic floor disorder.”

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the medical claim and the product have come apart. What the record proves concerns a pessary that reduced leakage in a handful of women and never reached the FDA. What the company sells is a fitness accessory whose central number, a 35% lift in muscle function, rests on no published evidence and ships with a disclaimer that it treats nothing. A wellness product needs no clearance. But $2.5 million of public money went into the regulated version, and that version is not on sale.

What to watch

• Whether a 510(k) for the pessary is ever submitted. The grant funding that testing ended July 31, 2025.
• Any study behind the “up to 35%” activation figure. Today it is a marketing number.
• Whether the pessary returns to the catalog, or the company says plainly that the program is over.
• Headcount. The Y Combinator directory lists a team size of 1, against three people named on the site.
• Retail distribution. The wholesale and multipack bundles are both marked unavailable.

In their words

Liv Labs funding profile on HVCFHealthcare Venture Capital Fund

Related companies

• Modern Fertility: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. A finger prick hormone panel sold to women who were not trying to conceive
• Almond ObGyn: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. A membership OB-GYN practice built to be, in its own words, “like One Medical but for women’s health,” combining a single Los Angeles clinic with telehealth
• Veera Health: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. An online clinic for polycystic ovary syndrome, built in Mumbai in 2020 and funded by Y Combinator and Sequoia Surge
• Flowly: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. A Los Angeles company that mails subscribers a VR headset and a heart rate sensor, then teaches them to calm their own nervous system to manage chronic pain

Sources

1. Public recordClinicalTrials.gov NCT05611970, with posted resultsClinicalTrials.gov · updated Feb 21, 2026
2. Public recordNIH RePORTER R44HD105574, awards 01, 02 and 03NICHD · FY2021 to FY2024
3. Public recordNSF award 2126867 and outcomes reportNSF · Jan 2022
4. Public recordopenFDA device database queriesFDA · Sep 22, 2026
5. Public recordUS Patents 11,337,788 B2 and D1,071,181 S1USPTO · 2022 and 2025
6. Public recordSEC EDGAR company and full text searchSEC · Sep 22, 2026
7. IndependentLiv Labs Lands SBIR Grant and Spot in Y CombinatorPolsky Center · Aug 18, 2021
8. Independent78 Million American Women Experience Pelvic Floor IssuesHypepotamus · Feb 2026
9. SpeechMelody Roberts alumni addressInstitute of Design · May 14, 2024
10. IndependentInternal Resistance Training for Your Pelvic FloorActive Mom Podcast · Apr 2026
11. CompanyFirst Study Participant Enrolled in Clinical TrialLiv Labs · Feb 13, 2023
12. CompanyLiv Labs Awarded Phase II Continuation SBIR GrantLiv Labs · Jul 20, 2024
13. CompanyPippa Recognized by Fast CompanyPRWeb · Sep 25, 2025
14. CompanyGet fit, inside and out, with Pippa: campaign and FAQKickstarter
15. CompanyLiv Labs profile and launch postY Combinator
16. Companylivlabsfitness.com pages and store catalogLiv Labs · Sep 22, 2026
17. CompanyLiv Labs company showcase entryNIH SEED · 2024