The team.

Veronica is building Whel out of Columbia University, where she is a member of the Class of 2028. Her starting point was not working in healthcare, but over half a decade of experience managing a personal hormonal condition that eventually required brain surgery, and years of seeing how little signal there is for women trying to navigate their options. Currently, she works across venture capital and finance at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Dorm Room Fund, and J.P. Morgan, which has given her a front-row seat to how the movement of capital decides which ideas get funded and which do not.

That lens is where Whel began, because spending time learning how capital gets allocated made a pattern hard to miss: drugs that already help many women’s conditions are often inexpensive generics that no company can profit from formally developing, so the system that funds drug development passes them over.

Whel is built to find those drugs and prove what they do.

Whel’s medical methodology, its evidence standards and the criteria behind which conditions and drugs it covers, is shaped by its medical advisor, Dr. Leah Ramella.

She is an incoming psychiatry resident (PGY-1) at Harvard South Shore Hospital, with roughly a decade of clinical research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, PCORI, and HRSA across Boston University, Tufts Medical Center, and Rutgers. She holds a DO from the New England College of Osteopathic Medicine and a BA from Harvard University.

Her clinical and research background anchors the conditions Whel covers, focusing Whel on areas where institutional evidence has historically failed patients.