Healthcare services · Maternal health billing

Loula

A New York City startup that handles billing, credentialing and revenue cycle work so independent birth and postpartum doulas can accept Medi-Cal and commercial insurance. Founded in 2022, it says it now works with several hundred doulas across California.

A rejected claim, then a phone call

Jadea Edmonds gave birth to her son in July 2022 with a Black midwife by her side. Watching that midwife move through the room, advocate for her and lean on what Edmonds called ancestral wisdom, she decided she wanted to do the same work. She trained as a doula while still working as a preschool teacher.

California had just added doula services to Medi-Cal, the state’s insurance program for low income residents, and Edmonds got approved to bill under the new benefit. Then the paperwork fought back. “My claims kept getting rejected,” she said. One bill bounced six times, and by the time she reached the right claims department she had blown past the six month filing window. “It hurts to know that I did all of that work,” she said.

A fellow doula told her about a service that could take the billing off her plate: Loula. The company offered to work her backlog for free, then to help her get approved under more insurance plans. It is one of a small crop of companies, known in the industry as administrative service organizations, that have grown up around a Medicaid benefit that pays doulas directly but gives them almost none of the infrastructure to collect it.

The billing wall behind a new benefit

California began paying doulas through Medi-Cal on January 1, 2023, part of a push to address the disproportionate rate at which Black women die in and around childbirth. Nearly half of births in the state happen under Medi-Cal, so the benefit opened a large client base almost overnight. It also handed doulas, most of whom are sole proprietors with no billing staff, a set of insurance codes, prior authorizations and denial appeals that look nothing like the cash businesses many of them ran before.

Medi-Cal sets the rates: $197.98 for a first visit, $685.07 for assisting a vaginal birth, and up to $3,263.31 across a full pregnancy that ends in a C-section, according to reporting by AfroLA. None of that accounts for the hours doulas actually put in outside billable visits, like late night calls or client potlucks. Companies such as Loula step into that gap, submitting claims, chasing denials and, in Loula’s case, paying doulas on a two week schedule regardless of whether the insurer has settled the bill yet, in exchange for a cut of each claim.

That cut has become a flashpoint. Loula’s standard fee is 17 percent of each bill; Edmonds pays 15 percent as an early client. Last week, hundreds of organizations and doula workers signed a letter asking health plans to make Medi-Cal doula enrollment easier and to offset the administrative fees that companies like Loula charge, according to AfroLA’s reporting. Andrea Howard, who runs billing in house at a nonprofit alternative called Birthworkers of Color Collective, told the outlet she thinks some of the fee based intermediaries are “pouncing on the fact that doulas are like, ‘Oh my god, we’re not getting paid.’”

Redd, Loula’s founder, frames the fee differently. “There’s a lot more red tape, a lot more bureaucracy,” she told AfroLA, describing what doulas face without help. “The 17% [fee] allows us to pay the doula no matter what and offer that financial stability while also making sure that our operating expenses are covered and that we are able to operate sustainably.”

From wellness app to devtool to doula billing

Lindsey Redd studied computer science at Stanford, then worked as a software engineer at Lyft and Stripe. She started her company in 2022 with an idea in the wellness space, building internal tools to onboard customers. According to a 2023 founder interview, the tooling problem interested her more than the wellness product did, and she and a co-founder pivoted to a developer platform called Onu, which turned internal scripts into shareable tools without frontend work.

That pivot happened mid application to Y Combinator: Redd has said the YC partners heard her original pitch, then asked her to reapply with a new idea a week later. Onu was accepted into the Winter 2023 batch. Loula’s current Y Combinator page still carries Onu’s original launch post, filed under Redd’s founder profile, alongside her present title of CEO at Loula. The company pivoted again after that, this time toward doula insurance billing, though the public record does not pin down exactly when. Y Combinator’s jobs page for the company now lists only Redd as an active founder, with a team size of seven as of September 2026.

From 30 doulas to a network, one snapshot at a time

Loula’s public launch came in February 2025 with about 30 doulas signed up. By July 2025, according to POCIT, the network had grown to 135 doulas, had served 400 families and had logged over 2,000 doula visits, with Redd citing month over month growth above 50 percent. By June 2026, AfroLA reported the doula count had passed 400. The company’s own website, as captured in this research, claims 2,000 families served and 16,000 doula visits completed, alongside figures it attributes to unspecified studies: a 47 percent lower risk of delivering by C-section and a 29 percent lower risk of preterm birth for families supported by Loula doulas. The site does not cite a study or a date for either figure.

Loula says it plans to expand beyond California, with Washington named as the next state, according to AfroLA’s reporting. Washington State has its own Medicaid doula benefit already in place, as does New York, where Loula is headquartered but does not yet operate under either state’s program, based on the sources reviewed for this profile.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: Loula’s founding, Y Combinator status and its pivot history are on the record. Its financial picture is not. No SEC filing exists under the company’s name, third party trackers list it as unfunded, and the team size and revenue figures circulating about it do not line up with each other. The growth story, from 30 doulas to several hundred, comes from a mix of founder statements to reporters and unattributed numbers on the company’s own site, not from an audited or independently verified count.

What to watch

• Whether the announced Washington expansion happens, and on what timeline.
• Whether the industry letter pushing health plans to offset ASO administrative fees leads to any change in how Loula and similar companies charge doulas.
• Whether an SEC Form D or other funding disclosure ever appears for the company, given its Y Combinator backing and the gap in current records.
• Whether Loula publishes a consistent, sourced figure for its doula network size, family count and clinical outcome claims.

In their words

Loula funding profile on HVCFHealthcare Venture Capital Fund

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Sources

1. IndependentMedi-Cal program creates billing headache for doulasAfroLA, Elizabeth Moss · Jun 24, 2026
2. IndependentThis New YC-Backed Startup Is Making It Easy For Doulas To Accept Health InsurancePOCIT, Habiba Katsha · Jul 22, 2025
3. InterviewFounder Spotlight, Lindsey Redd, CEO & Co-Founder of OnuMedium, Ash Rust for Sterling Road · May 9, 2023
4. Public recordLoula company profileY Combinator · accessed Sep 25, 2026
5. Public recordJobs at Loula, with founder, batch and team size dataY Combinator · accessed Sep 25, 2026
6. Public recordEDGAR company search results for “loula”SEC EDGAR · accessed Sep 25, 2026
7. Third-party trackerLoula, 2026 Company Profile, Team & CompetitorsTracxn · accessed Sep 25, 2026
8. Third-party trackerLoula Revenue 2025: $880K Est.GetLatka · accessed Sep 25, 2026
9. Public recordState Trends in Medicaid Coverage of Doula ServicesNASHP, Anoosha Hasan · 2026
10. Public recordDoula Services OverviewNew York State Department of Health · accessed Sep 25, 2026
11. CompanyLoula homepage, network statistics and payer listjoinloula.com · accessed Sep 25, 2026
12. CompanyLoula launch announcement, repostedLinkedIn, Michael Berhane · Jul 22, 2025