Supporting Baby Feeding Through Partnership

Andrea Ippolito, SDM ’12, and Mark Rangell, SM ’89, want to change how we provide breast and baby feeding support to families.

“It’s that whole-person care,” says Rangell when discussing their vision to support these families with both technology and access to providers.

Ippolito and Rangell are fulfilling this vision through a unique partnership between their companies, SimpliFed and nfant. SimpliFed is a telehealth platform that connects parents with health care providers who specialize in providing breast and baby feeding support. nfant is a technology company that develops products and solutions to assist new parents and infants in breast and baby feeding.

Ippolito is the founder and CEO of SimpliFed. Rangell is a co-founder and managing partner of both Execullence, LLC, a growth strategy consulting firm that has provided strategic advisory and oversight to nfant for over three years, and x4 Capital Partners, an investment syndicate that has invested in nfant.

A collaboration rooted in the MIT experience

Although they ended up in overlapping industries, Ippolito and Rangell have very different backgrounds and pursued different academic paths. Rangell entered MIT Sloan after starting his career in a technical role for IBM.

“Having just had my 35-year MIT Sloan Reunion, I will say that attending MIT Sloan and building the long-term relationships that came out of my time there has definitely changed the trajectory of my life,” says Rangell.

After graduating from MIT Sloan, Rangell initially worked in product management, marketing and sales, and went on serve in COO/CEO roles at companies that he co-founded across the healthcare technology and service sectors. Finally, he co-founded his growth strategy consulting firm, Execullence, LLC, and subsequently co-founded x4 Capital Partners. Rangell remains very active in the MIT Sloan community, coaching and mentoring both prospective and current MIT Sloan students.

Ippolito is a biomedical engineer who received her master’s degree from MIT's System Design & Management program, which is jointly offered by MIT Sloan and the MIT School of Engineering and teaches both engineering and management skills. While at MIT, she was a co-director of MIT Hacking Medicine, the MIT Sloan Healthcare and BioInnovations Conference, and MIT Accelerate, a contest in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. She also utilized the resources at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

“It’s hard to describe how monumental a role MIT has played in my entrepreneurial journey,” remarks Ippolito.

Following her time at MIT, Ippolito worked in government and co-founded Smart Scheduling, a medical scheduling software eventually acquired by athenahealth. After experiencing her first pregnancy and becoming a mother, she realized how difficult it was to access specialized medical support for breast and baby feeding. Using the entrepreneurial skills that she honed at MIT, in 2019 she founded SimpliFed to make maternal health care accessible, providing appointments with breast and baby feeding health care providers at no cost to families with health insurance.

Ippolito and her company were then featured in a 2022 Slice of MIT article published by the MIT Alumni Association, which caught Rangell’s attention just as activity was starting to heat up at nfant.

“When I read about Andrea and SimpliFed, I just lit up and said, ‘I must meet this person,’” says Rangell.

Filling a gap in maternal health care

nfant started as a technology company that created a smart baby feeding bottle that helped premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) learn to feed. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Tommy Cunningham, then decided to expand nfant’s focus to help all babies and families thrive in settings outside of just the hospital environment, leading to the strategic collaboration with Execullence.

Prior to reading the MIT Alumni Association article, Rangell and Cunningham had begun assessing potential collaborations with telehealth providers but were disappointed with the lack of focus and expertise in maternal and infant care. Upon meeting and discovering their shared goals for improving care for new mothers and babies, nfant and SimpliFed decided to work together.

Having now collaborated with SimpliFed for more than two years, nfant recently launched its flagship product, nfant Thrive Breast, a wearable device that, for the first time, detects and measures milk flow from a lactating parent to their baby. Working under the premise that technology alone cannot provide optimal care, nfant Thrive Breast connects to a proprietary Tracker App containing medical content developed in conjunction with SimpliFed and which enables parents to book a consultation with a SimpliFed lactation consultant.

“What we determined long ago was that if we could couple our breastfeeding and bottle-feeding solutions with access to SimpliFed’s CareAllies and lactation consultants, whose services are covered by a large and growing number of public and private health insurers, we could together fill an enormous gap in the health care service sector,” says Rangell.

Driven by an appreciation for nfant’s offerings, Ippolito’s team at SimpliFed has also been involved in numerous aspects of development and marketing of the nfant Thrive product line. They have collaborated on the development of a library of resources for parents, website content, testimonials, product testing and feedback, all of which has played a critical role in helping nfant optimize its customer experience.

“What I love about nfant is that they have tools that allow families, providers, and physicians to really understand what is happening with a woman's health related to breastfeeding and baby feeding,” says Ippolito when discussing the general lack of resources available to parents for making decisions about breast and baby feeding.

Rangell and Ippolito are continuing to develop their respective companies’ partnership to provide more resources to young families. On the product development side, nfant is working to discover how to measure new types of data from nfant Thrive Bottle and Breast, while SimpliFed is working with nfant’s Clinical Advisory Board to ensure that this information can be optimally organized and presented to enable pediatricians and lactation consultants to better support their patients’ health goals. Democratizing access and increasing insurance coverage are other key objectives shared by the companies, who are working on strategic initiatives to provide their integrated offerings as a bundled package available through State Medicaid organizations and private insurers.

“The past two years have been so critical to building mutual trust and collaboration, and we’re excited to finally unleash the transformative value that we together can provide across maternal and infant health,” says Rangell and Ippolito.

Credit: Courtesy of nfant

Building impactful relationships

Both Rangell and Ippolito agree that their partnership would not have come to fruition if not for the MIT network. Meeting through MIT imbued their partnership with a level of trust and familiarity that they say would not otherwise have been as easy to achieve.

Rangell and Ippolito's gratitude for the MIT network is evident when asked what their advice is for current MIT students. Both pointed to the importance of forming and leveraging relationships throughout the MIT community.

“Building relationships and doing good for the community all comes back to you in spades, while fostering your own continued growth and development,” advises Ippolito.