Name: Gloria Kolb
Position: Founder and CEO of Elidah, maker of ELITONE
Company: Elidah
Website: https://elitone.com/
About Gloria Kolb and Elidah
I am a advocate for women’s health, and especially getting pelvic help early. I have a background in engineering with degrees from MIT and Stanford, starting with designing hip implants for J&J. (feel free to elaborate if it needs to be longer)
I started Elidah, maker of Elitone, almost 10 years ago with my husband and cofounder. It stemmed from a need to find a treatment that I would use on myself, and couldn’t find anything available that wasn’t vaginal. Anything vaginal meant that you had to lock yourself in your bedroom and be flat on your back for 20 minutes every day. There is no time for that with little kids running around! There were quite a lot of challenges. With our backgrounds, product development was fairly straightforward. We were fortunate to get some grant funding to help with these efforts. However, because what we were making had never been done before (neuromuscular stimulation that was external) we were put through the ringer to get FDA approvals with clinical studies the way they wanted them.
The second major hurdle was funding. This is a treatment for women for an issue that no one talks about. So many potential investors (almost all men) either thought the problem was niche, not big enough (even though 1 in 3 women have bladder leaks), or on the flip side “too crowded.” More specifically investors typically fall into a medical device/life science bucket or a consumer products bucket. We had the regulations of a medical device but was selling to the consumer – and so we didn’t fit investor’s mold.
This year is really exciting. We plan to launch in many more countries, and complete clinical studies for a male post-prostatectomy treatment.
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