Stork Labs secures $85K in non-dilutive grants for maternal health device

What's the deal? Santa Cruz-based Stork Labs Medical has secured $85,000 in non-dilutive funding across three grants awarded by SEGA Accelerate California, UC Davis Big Bang!, and UC Launch. The company is developing a flexible, sensor-guided device to make assisted vaginal deliveries safer and more predictable.

Why now? The founders — UC Santa Cruz Ph.D. graduates Maryam Tebyani and Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony — took part in three separate accelerators over three months. All three programs wrapped within the same week, and the team won an award from each, collecting the full $85,000 in seven days.

What's the endgame? Stork Labs has built a fabrication process for cable-driven soft robots and shaped its business model through more than 200 customer discovery interviews with physicians, mothers, and midwives. The grants — which carry no equity strings — let the founders keep full ownership as they move into the next phase of prototyping.

The company traces back to 2017, when Tebyani attended a medical device workshop at a robotics conference and saw an opportunity to apply soft robotics to childbirth. It has also secured earlier non-dilutive support through the NSF I-Corps program and the UCSF–Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium.

The signal: Non-dilutive grant capital is flowing toward maternal health, a sector long short on dedicated innovation. Stork Labs' sweep of three accelerator awards points to growing appetite among academic and regional programs to back devices aimed at making childbirth safer.

Read more: Santa Cruz Works

Image credit: Generated with Gemini