Founded in 2021, Midi Health provides virtual care to menopausal women and recently crossed the $1 billion valuation mark in a February funding round.
At Business Insider’s The Long Play event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Strober said AI has transformed her business. She also spoke about how she took inspiration from her lifelong friendship with Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube and one of Google’s earliest executives.
“I thought I was starting a menopause company, but it turns out I’m building an AI company,” Strober said onstage.
Midi Health, based in Palo Alto, California, now uses AI to train thousands of its providers on how to answer patient questions.
That’s helped the company scale to serving more than 20,000 women a week or millions a year.
The move wasn’t easy. Because research on women’s health especially menopause is sparse, general-purpose AI chatbots trained on the open internet weren’t good enough.
Midi Health had to build its own chatbot using only high-quality data and excluding studies that have since been disproven.
“There’s a lot of old, outdated data,” she said.
A friendship with Susan Wojcicki
In building her company, Strober draws inspiration from one of her oldest friends, Wojcicki, who rented out her garage to the company’s founders. Wojcicki died in 2024 after living with lung cancer.
Strober has been friends with Wojcicki since age 10.
“I had the opportunity to watch Google get started in her house, and I used to go over there all the time,” Strober said. “But to me, she was just a normal person, like she wasn’t a luminary. And it’s actually incredibly helpful in your life to see normal people do great things.”
Strober said it was inspiring to watch Wojcicki “grow to build this huge company,” and at the same time, she found it “reassuring.”
“Also, it shows that you don’t have to be a super person to do these things,” Strober said. “You just have to actually be brave and decide to go do it.”
AI dinners and office hours
Beyond Midi Health’s chatbot, Strober spoke about how her startup uses AI in its internal systems.
Strober has been flying around the country to have dinner with the company’s nurses, talking through how they should use AI at work.
She said she introduced one nurse who was trying to standardize hundreds of contracts to Google Gemini. The job, which the nurse thought would take about a month, ended up taking 10 minutes.
Midi Health has also started holding AI office hours, where the company’s software engineers help different teams “AI-ify” themselves.
Strober says the shift isn’t leading to mass layoffs.
“It’s not threatening it’s really about augmenting their jobs,” she said.
