For the past decade, Rock Health cofounder and prolific startup investor Halle Tecco has made her name as a voice for the voiceless in fertility care.
She founded fertility e-commerce startup Natalist in 2019 and egg freezing and donation startup Cofertility in 2022. She bet early on several fertility startups like unicorn Kindbody and healthcare provider Tia. She espoused radical transparency about her previous struggles to have a child.
While she raised funding to help other people get pregnant, though, Tecco's battles with infertility continued. She suffered eleven miscarriages, including losing twins at 17 weeks pregnant.
Now, she's taking a huge step back from the industry she helped cement.
"People expect me to continue that narrative. But I've moved on, and I don't want to continue talking about it," she told Business Insider. "I'm not trying to be an infertility influencer."
As she built businesses that aimed to give women control in their fertility journeys, Tecco struggled with a lack of control over her own. Behind closed doors, her dogged optimism clashed with grief and frustration. Her therapist told her, "This is you getting PTSD treatment while still at war."
Today, Tecco is done making new fertility bets. She wants to return to what got her excited about digital health in the first place — encouraging new and exciting ideas in a sluggish industry.
She's writing a book about what to expect when innovating in healthcare. She started teaching a course at Harvard Medical School this year about the complex network of stakeholders involved in healthcare entrepreneurship. She co-hosts the digital health podcast The Heart of Healthcare, and she sits on the boards of healthcare benefits company Collective Health and Cofertility.
She'll continue to support the women's health companies she's invested in. But as far as she's concerned, the fertility-centered chapter of her life is closed.
"I'm a healthcare investor, not a fertility investor. And I want to get back to that," she said.
When Tecco went to Harvard Business School to get her MBA in 2009, she was already interested in healthcare innovation. But it was her time at Apple, where she spent the following summer working on healthcare offerings in the tech giant's app store, that brought her frustrations with the industry to a head.
"There's so much money in healthcare, and such a big opportunity to improve healthcare. Why is nobody building fun, useful things over here?" she recalls thinking.
Returning to business school for her second year, Tecco reconnected with classmate Nate Gross as he was getting his clinician networking startup Doximity, now a publicly traded company, off the ground. Together, they began an independent study about how to get entrepreneurs to bring fresh ideas and technologies to healthcare.
From that study, Rock Health was born — named for the many hours Tecco and Gross spent in front of a whiteboard in Harvard's Rock Center for Entrepreneurship.
Tecco and Gross started Rock Health in 2010 as an accelerator program at a time when few vertical-focused startup accelerators existed. Y Combinator and Techstars both launched about five years earlier to supercharge seed-stage tech startups with venture funding and expert guidance. Rock Health offered founders the chance to do the same in healthcare, with backing from VC firms like Accel Partners and NEA plus companies like Microsoft and Nike.
The firm has made some impressive investments through its venture fund, including in Waystar and Tempus AI, which both went public in 2024; Omada Health, which appears to be eyeing an IPO in 2025; and Lyra Health, which last raised capital at a nearly $5.6 billion valuation in 2022.
Gross and Tecco both attested that they were told "no" many, many times during Rock Health's creation. They faced plenty of pushback from longtime healthcare builders and investors who rejected their vision to bring more tech into the industry.
Those dismissals only strengthened Tecco's resolve.
"I made the promise that I will never be the cranky old guard. There's no use in it," Tecco said. "We need as many smart people helping us solve these problems as possible."
After Tecco moved with her husband Cloudera cofounder Jeff Hammerbacher from San Francisco to New York City in 2016, she stepped away from Rock Health. She'd set her eyes on her next goal: building a family.
Getting pregnant turned out to be "a huge struggle," Tecco said, as she confronted the high costs of fertility treatments, a stunning lack of support and education, and no guarantees of pregnancy. She told Business Insider in 2019 that her own fertility journey was fraught with "a lot of misinformation, a lot of secrecy and shame."
Tecco's son was born through IVF in 2017 after four years of trying. Adamant about improving the fertility care experience for others, Tecco officially launched Natalist two years later to provide products and educational materials to people trying to get pregnant, from at-home ovulation tests to prenatal vitamins.
"It gave me a lot of satisfaction to support others in a way that I hadn't been supported," she said.
Tecco was early in the femtech investment wave, too, founding and backing fertility startups when few others did. She first invested in Kindbody's seed round in 2018; by some estimates, VC funding for women's health increased more than 300% between 2018 and 2023, even as healthcare funding slumped overall last year.
While running Natalist, overseeing women's health strategy at Everly Health after Natalist was acquired, and then cofounding egg donation startup Cofertility, Tecco wanted to have a second child.
Getting pregnant a second time proved even more difficult. Tecco endured multiple unsuccessful rounds of IVF and eleven miscarriages, over nearly five years.
Throwing herself into her work did little to help her escape the heartbreak. Infertility and pregnancy, as she spent her spare time helping thousands of patients trying to conceive, were always on her mind. She wrestled with jealousy over other people's "miracle babies" as she waited desperately for her own.
Secondary infertility, the difficulty of having another child after a previous successful pregnancy, robbed Tecco of countless hours of her life and plenty of happiness. Miscarrying twins at 17 weeks pregnant was "the first time in my years where I didn't have a plan B," she wrote in a 2023 blog post.
She paused fertility treatments in the summer of 2022 to spend time with her family. After much reflection and therapy, she realized that "overcoming" her secondary infertility wouldn't mean having another child. It meant making peace with the idea that she never would.
"It was harder than I can explain to make that decision, especially if you're someone like me, where you're like, I want this thing, I'm going to get this thing," Tecco said.
But, she said, "I wanted to go into my 40s being really clear about my intentions of moving on."
Tecco entered healthcare not solely to invest in startups, or to build her own, but to help other aspiring healthcare entrepreneurs with fresh perspectives and technologies in clearing the industry's many hurdles. Now 41 years old, she wants to get back to that.
This year, she's been focused on writing a book with that very thesis, aiming to pass along her knowledge to the next generation of healthcare builders. She sees it as the natural next step up from her blog, where she's covered topics from the value of an MBA versus a master's degree in public health (both degrees that Tecco holds) to why a startup may not be venture-backable.
But, true to form, Tecco is juggling multiple other ventures as she writes. She's still recording The Heart of Healthcare podcast alongside industry experts including Bessemer Ventures Partners investor Steve Kraus and Fenwick & West startup lawyer Michael Esquivel. In her classes at Columbia University and Harvard Medical School, she's teaching and learning from hopeful healthcare innovators. She's stopped angel investing, choosing instead to focus on the startups she's already backed, but she's also invested her personal wealth in top venture funds, including Oak HC/FT, Seven Seven Six, and Union Square Ventures.
While Tecco's Cofertility cofounder Lauren Makler oversees day-to-day operations at the startup as CEO, Tecco remains deeply involved with the company's strategy and fundraising efforts as a board member. And Rock Health is "still running Halle's game plan," Gross said.
Makler and Gross both called Tecco's ambition "relentless."
"If Halle has conviction in something, she does not look back," Makler said. "And even having gone through what Halle has gone through, her conviction, effort, and enthusiasm for what we're doing has never wavered."
Tecco doesn't regret the many years she spent speaking out about infertility. She still feels strongly about the twisted financial incentives in fertility care and the stigmas associated with assisted reproduction, even though she's not a patient anymore.
"I don't want to add anything, but I wouldn't want to take anything away. It is still such an important part of my story," she said.
Tecco's book, which she hopes to publish in late 2025, will be infused with her personal experiences, which Tecco said she understands people are interested in. But at its core, she hopes it'll be the "welcome guide" she never got for people interested in healthcare innovation, as motivating as it is practical.
"My goal is that readers close the book, and they're like, let's do this," she said.