Bailey Renger was interning at NASA when, at 21, she had a cancer scare. “I had a solid mass, but they couldn’t tell me definitively whether or not it was malignant,” she recalls. She fought for more screening, but her insurance wouldn’t cover additional imaging.
“Why can we see to the edges of the universe,” she wondered, “but it’s so difficult to see two-and-a-half centimeters inside the human body?”
Today, Renger, now 26, is launching BeSound, a breast screening ultrasound startup that aims to catch what mammograms miss or insurance won’t cover. The startup raised $6.8 million, Fortune is the first to report. Its investors include Overwater Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and Muse Capital, as well as Lux Capital and Tom Hale, the CEO of Oura.
Like other consumer health startups—from Oura to Prenuvo—BeSound aims to reach the savvy consumer who is eager to take their health into their own hands. “Bailey’s vision for BeSound is exactly the kind of founder-led innovation that moves healthcare forward,” Hale tells Fortune.
But there are also some trends in traditional cancer screening that support this model. Breast cancer rates in women under 40 are increasing, but insurance still does not recommend or cover screening for most of those women. Mammograms are less effective at catching cancer for women with dense breast tissue (about 40 million women in the U.S.), meaning those women may need ultrasound imaging in addition to mammography. The FDA updated its mammography guidelines in 2023 to require facilities to notify patients if they have dense breasts. “The current infrastructure does not support 40 million women now coming in for an ultrasound scan every year,” Renger says. She sees BeSound as a “front door” to hospitals, doing initial screening and then sending patients to doctors for next steps.
The startup is launching with a location in Los Angeles, where it will cost $350 for a breast ultrasound. It’s aiming to improve the patient experience, cutting down on wait time for results after screening—with the help of AI. Eventually, Renger is interested in expanded to all forms of ultrasound-based imaging for women’s health.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
"The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death. And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming."
— Florence Welch on suffering a miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy
