Instacart CEO Fidji Simo launches her health care side hustle

– Long-awaited launch. Since she took over Instacart in August 2021, CEO Fidji Simo has been working toward taking the grocery-delivery unicorn public. Almost two years later, Instacart’s IPO is still pending. While the company filed confidentially for an IPO last year, it’s still waiting for the markets to thaw. 

But this week, Simo celebrated a triumph that has nothing to do with grocery delivery: She and her cofounders officially opened the Metrodora Institute, a for-profit health care clinic that will focus on treating complex neuroimmune diseases, including long COVID. The clinical facility and research center also has a nonprofit arm and is located in Salt Lake City.

Simo first revealed the details of her Metrodora plans to Fortune in 2021 when I profiled her at the start of her Instacart tenure. At the time, the clinic planned to open its doors last summer. But “building a 60,000 square foot facility is a lot of work—and the project just also got bigger, and more ambitious as we went,” Simo told me this week, in a joint interview with Dr. Laura A. Pace, Metrodora’s cofounder and CEO.

Courtesy of Metrodora

Simo and her cofounders have raised $35 million in funding from private investors. Metrodora has also landed philanthropic funding for its nonprofit arm, including what Simo calls a “large” donation from the family foundation of Sequoia Capital chair Michael Moritz, whose VC firm also invested in Instacart and who sits on Instacart’s board.

Metrodora’s founding mission was to give “the industry a blueprint for how women should be treated in the medical world,” Simo told me in 2021. Simo herself suffers from endometriosis and a condition known as POTS—and, she says, she spent years trying to get the medical establishment to take her pain seriously. More than 80% of the people affected by such complex “neuroimmune axis disorders” are women.

Even so, Metrodora’s founders have stopped marketing the startup as focused on women’s health. The reasons are part of why health care for more than half of the population is so underfunded and overlooked by the business establishment.

Many investors and executives just don’t take it seriously, as I’ve reported extensively. And even those that do, Simo and Pace found, tend to think that “women’s health” starts and stops with our reproductive systems. “When we say ‘women’s health,’ people immediately go to reproduction or menopause. So we weren’t landing the message that we needed to,” Pace says.

Fortunately, Simo, who climbed the Facebook executive ranks before taking over Instacart, is by now a veteran marketer.

“We pivoted the narrative, we didn’t pivot the mission,” she says. “It’s an interesting challenge for us to acknowledge that 80% of our patient population is going to be women—but not to be put in that box of reproductive health.”

Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan

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PARTING WORDS

“There’re so many men walking around with confidence that’s unearned. If women do the same, they’re monsters. I’m confident in my abilities, confident that I’m funnier than most people. That’s not even my ego, that’s years in the game. I did the work, have the respect of others."

—Abbott Elementary actress Janelle James