Achitha Jacob, the Proactive For Her founder story

Most founder stories start with a job somebody quit. This one starts with a degree she walked away from. Achitha Jacob had a seat at Harvard Business School, the kind of credential people spend a career trying to earn. She left it unfinished, flew back to India, and in August 2020 started a company built around a question most of Indian healthcare had been comfortable ignoring: why do women get worse care?

The company was Proactive For Her, a women’s health clinic that lived online and, later, on the ground floor of buildings across Bengaluru. Over the next five years it raised a $5.5 million Series A led by Vertex Ventures, put physical clinics into half a dozen neighbourhoods, and ended with an acquisition by the fertility chain IVF Access. For a category that barely existed in India when she began, that is a full arc.

From IIT Bombay to a Harvard exit

Jacob is an alumna of IIT Bombay, one of the few women in a famously male engineering cohort. The institute shows up again and again in how people describe her, usually paired with the line that became her shorthand in the press: the IIT graduate who dropped out of Harvard.

Before the MBA she had built an operator’s career rather than a founder’s. She worked in management consulting, then moved into healthcare itself, including a stint at DaVita in India, the dialysis company. That detail matters, because the clinic floor is where the idea for Proactive For Her actually formed. Harvard was supposed to be the next step. It turned into a detour she chose not to finish.

The insight: care in India is gendered

At DaVita, Jacob noticed something she could not unsee. Women on dialysis, a treatment you cannot skip without consequences, were quietly deprioritising their own care. They came in later. They worried about the cost to the household. They put husbands, children and parents first and themselves last, even with their kidneys failing.

That pattern scales far beyond dialysis. A woman will book a paediatrician appointment the day her child sneezes and sit on her own symptoms for months. Menstrual pain gets normalised. PCOS goes undiagnosed for years. Sexual and reproductive health barely gets discussed, because the average clinic visit comes wrapped in judgement. Jacob put the thesis plainly when she later raised her Series A:

“The stigma attached to women’s menstrual, sexual and reproductive health issues, coupled with lack of access to non-judgemental support, have long prevented many women from addressing their healthcare needs.”

The fix she wanted to build was not another generic telemedicine app. It was a clinic designed from scratch for women, where the default tone was clinical, private and free of the lecture.

What Proactive For Her actually does

Proactive For Her is best described as a digital clinic for women that grew physical clinics. The platform offers confidential, evidence-based care across the stages of a woman’s life: menstrual health, sexual and reproductive health, PCOS, fertility, hormone testing, STI panels, HPV and cancer screenings, postpartum support, and mental and emotional health coaching.

A patient could start with an anonymous teleconsult, order an at-home test, and then walk into a physical clinic if she needed one. The promise underneath all of it was consistency: a patient-centric, liberal, empathetic approach, as the company put it, rather than the brisk dismissal women so often describe. In a country where roughly 600 million women are the addressable market, even a focused slice of that is enormous.

The early struggle

Launching in August 2020 meant launching into a pandemic. That cut two ways. Lockdowns made the case for telehealth obvious, which helped a digital-first clinic. But the categories Jacob picked, sexual and reproductive health most of all, carry a stigma that no amount of product polish removes overnight. You cannot growth-hack your way past a patient’s embarrassment.

So the early work was as much about education as medicine. Webinars, explainers, patient guides, and a brand voice that treated women as adults who deserved straight answers. By the time of its Series A, the company said it had reached more than 5,000 women through consults and education, with a stated goal of crossing 100,000 inside a year. Numbers like that look small next to a consumer app. For a clinic asking women to talk honestly about their bodies, every one of them was hard-won trust.

Funding: seed, a Vertex-led Series A, and a flagship clinic

The money arrived in step with the proof. Late in 2020, soon after launch, Proactive For Her raised a seed round of roughly $1.2 million led by Nexus Venture Partners. That bought time to build the digital product and learn what women actually wanted from it.

The headline round came in February 2022: a $5.5 million Series A led by Vertex Ventures South East Asia and India, with Nexus, an existing backer, coming along again. The plan attached to the cheque was specific. Alongside expanding the digital products, the company would open a flagship offline clinic in Bengaluru, turning the app into a place you could physically visit. Later, the company also took on venture debt from Stride Ventures, bringing total funding to around $7 million across its life.

Growth: clinics across Bengaluru, then fertility

The offline bet kept growing. By 2024 Proactive For Her was running multiple clinics across Bengaluru, in neighbourhoods like Indiranagar, Koramangala, HSR, Whitefield and beyond, and announced an expansion framed around serving hundreds of thousands of women in the city. It also pushed deeper into fertility services, a natural extension of the reproductive-health work and, as it turned out, a bridge to what came next.

The strategy was never to be everywhere at once. It was to go deep in one city, prove that a women-first clinic model could work both online and on the street, and build a brand women trusted enough to recommend to a friend. That focus is part of why the company became one of the most recognisable names in Indian femtech despite never chasing nationwide scale.

The IVF Access acquisition

In 2025, Proactive For Her was acquired by IVF Access, a fertility-clinic chain. The financial terms were not disclosed. The logic, though, was easy to read. Both companies were backed by Vertex Ventures, a shared investor that is reported to have helped the deal along, and the fit was obvious: Proactive’s digital reach and women’s-health services slotting into a chain built around fertility care.

An acquisition is not the fairy-tale IPO that startup folklore prefers. It is, however, a real outcome in a category that most Indian investors wrote off as too niche and too sensitive only a few years earlier. Jacob built a women’s health company to the point where a larger healthcare player wanted to own it. That is the bet paying off.

Achitha Jacob’s net worth & ownership

There is no verified public net-worth figure for Achitha Jacob, and any number you find online claiming otherwise is guesswork. Her equity stake in Proactive For Her was never disclosed. The financial terms of the IVF Access acquisition were not made public either, which means no payout can be honestly inferred. What is documented is the company she built and the roughly $7 million it raised along the way. The rest is private, and we will leave it that way rather than print a fabricated figure.

What Achitha Jacob’s story teaches Indian founders

The first lesson is about category timing. Jacob started in women’s sexual and reproductive health when most investors found the space uncomfortable and most patients found it unspeakable. She did not wait for the category to become fashionable. She helped make it one. Founders chasing only the obvious, already-validated markets should notice that the harder, stigmatised problem was also the more defensible one.

The second is that walking away can be a strategy, not a failure. Leaving Harvard mid-degree looks reckless on paper. It was a bet that the company in front of her was worth more than the credential behind her, and the bet held. Conviction sometimes means giving up the safe, prestigious thing while everyone tells you not to. The women who quietly skipped their own care taught her the problem was real. She was the one who decided it was worth a career to fix.

Frequently asked questions about Achitha Jacob and Proactive For Her

Who is Achitha Jacob?

Achitha Jacob is the founder and CEO of Proactive For Her, a women’s health startup she launched in Bengaluru in August 2020. An alumna of IIT Bombay, she enrolled at Harvard Business School and left the MBA before completing it to build the company. Earlier she worked in management consulting and in healthcare operating roles, including at DaVita in India.

What is Achitha Jacob’s net worth?

There is no verified public net-worth figure for Achitha Jacob. Her equity stake in Proactive For Her was never disclosed, and the financial terms of the IVF Access acquisition were not made public, so any specific number circulating online is unverified. What is on the record is the company she built and the roughly $7 million it raised.

What does Proactive For Her do?

Proactive For Her is a digital and in-clinic women’s health platform offering confidential, evidence-based care across life stages, menstrual and sexual health, PCOS, fertility, hormone and STI testing, HPV and cancer screenings, postpartum care and health coaching, delivered online, at home and through clinics in Bengaluru.

What happened to Proactive For Her?

Proactive For Her was acquired by IVF Access, a Vertex Ventures-backed fertility chain, in 2025. The financial terms were not disclosed. The shared investor between the two companies is reported to have helped the transaction along.