We recently connected with Dr. Somi Javaid and have shared our conversation below.

Dr. Somi, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Before I ever put on a white coat, I witnessed how dangerous the healthcare system could be for women, especially women who don’t fit the “mold.” My mother had been misdiagnosed for months. Her symptoms were dismissed, waved away with phrases like, “It’s just stress.” She was 45 when everything came to a head.

“Somi, you need to come home.”

That was my father’s voice on the other end of the phone. My mom was being rushed into emergency heart surgery. What nearly killed her wasn’t just a medical condition, it was a healthcare system that didn’t listen to women.
I was pre-med at the time, and that moment changed the course of my life. I knew I wanted to go into women’s health but not just to treat symptoms. I wanted to change the system itself.

Years later, during my first clinical job, the reality hit: seeing 50 patients a day left no time for meaningful care, let alone transformation. So I did what most don’t, I left. I bought a building and opened a practice that centered the provider and the patient. HerMD was built to tackle the most overlooked areas of women’s health: advanced gynecology, menopause, and sexual health. We offered longer visits, evidence-based treatment, and did it all within an insurance-based model.
What I thought would be a small, local practice quietly serving my community ended up attracting patients from 35 states and 3 countries. The need was staggering. Eventually, I partnered with two other women of color and raised $40 million to scale the business.

HerMD didn’t start as a brand idea, it started as a daughter helpless to a system in crisis, but not hopeless.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Dr. Somi Javaid, a board-certified OB/GYN, surgeon, and the founder of HerMD. I’ve spent the last two decades advocating for a healthcare system that actually works for women especially in areas that have long been ignored like menopause and sexual health.

When I launched HerMD, it wasn’t just to build another medical practice. It was to solve the systemic issues I kept seeing over and over again; women being dismissed, rushed, misdiagnosed, and left out of the research altogether. I wanted to create a space where evidence-based care, longer appointment times, and meaningful patient-provider relationships were the norm.
In ten years, HerMD delivered over 115,000 patient encounters and scaled care across five states. We helped spark national conversations about menopause and sexual health on social media, through press, and at live events. But we didn’t stop at treating patients, we trained providers through HerMD University, built data collection into our care model, and presented findings at major medical conferences to help shift clinical norms.

Only about 30% of healthcare providers receive any formal training in menopause, even though women will spend 40% of their lives in it. That gap is unacceptable. So we got to work, not just to provide better care, but to build the infrastructure to educate, advocate, and scale that care far beyond our own clinics.

What sets us apart isn’t just the model, it’s the mission. We went after the biggest barriers: education, time, female leadership, investment, and data. We didn’t just identify the problems, we built solutions from the inside out.

What I’m most proud of is the ripple effect. Thousands of women feeling seen, heard, and cared for often, for the first time in their lives, and a growing network of providers, investors, and leaders who now expect more from women’s healthcare. That’s the legacy I care about.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I started HerMD in 2015, before ‘femtech’ was a buzzword and long before menopause made headlines. At the time, there was little investor appetite for women’s health, let alone sexual health and menopause. So I bootstrapped. I cashed in my 401(k), dipped into savings, and built the first HerMD clinic brick by brick. It wasn’t glamorous, just a big vision, a handful of exam rooms, and an unwavering belief that women deserved better.

But the results were undeniable. In less than seven years, I made the decision to scale and raised $10 million in Series A funding. Today, my fundraising efforts sit just shy of $40 million and every dollar has gone toward disrupting a system that wasn’t built for women in the first place.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

There were moments, especially in the early years, when I questioned whether I could keep going. I had left the security of traditional practice, poured my savings into building HerMD from the ground up, and was trying to prove a model of care that most of the industry didn’t believe was possible. Insurance reimbursements were delayed, the overhead was relentless, and there were nights I’d lie awake wondering if I’d made a mistake.

But in the midst of that chaos, something would always snap me back into focus. One of those moments came when a patient flew in from Seattle. She had been married for seven years and had never been able to have s*x with her husband. She had seen countless doctors and was told over and over again that nothing was wrong. At HerMD, we took the time to listen, to investigate, and to treat, not dismiss. We were able to diagnose her, help her heal, and, in her words, save her marriage.

Then there was the woman who drove two days from Florida. She had survived a stroke and was told by her doctors to “just be grateful” she was alive. But she was devastated, terrified that the intimacy and partnership she once had with her husband were gone forever. She cried in my office, not from physical pain, but from the fear that she had survived only to lose herself. We treated her, too. We gave her a diagnosis, a plan, and more importantly, her sense of self back.

These weren’t just good outcomes, they were lifelines. They reminded me why I built HerMD in the first place. This was never about building a clinic. It was about building a space where women could finally be seen, heard, and cared for without shame or dismissal. That’s what we call HerMD magic. And in my hardest moments, it’s what reminded me to keep going.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.drsomi.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somijavaidmd/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/somi-javaid/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrSomiJavaidMD
• Other: Podcast: The DisruptHER is on Spotify, Apple podcast, and Youtube.