Portrait No. 001
Jessica Bell van der Wal
CEO & Co-Founder
Frame
It began at the intersection of my life’s work in healthcare and my own infertility. I had every advantage on paper. Education. Access. Resources. And still, I found myself spiraling through diagnoses I didn’t see coming and decisions I wasn’t prepared to make. That gap — between what we should know and what we actually know — became impossible to ignore. Three years later, we finally had our daughter. Then COVID hit. My husband builds healthcare technology. I build healthcare systems. We were locked in a house with a newborn, angry at the system and fired up to change it. Becoming a mother didn’t make me softer. It made me sharper. It raised the stakes. This isn’t just a company. It’s the answer to a question I once asked myself: why didn’t anyone tell me sooner?
In her words
“For her — and for every family still finding their way — we’re making the fertility journey what it should be: easier.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
Building a company feels like controlled free fall. Every few days you think, this might be it. The highs are brief. The weight of your team, your customers, your investors; its constant. I’m building this alongside my husband. Two founders. One house. No separation between work and life. There is no off switch. And as a woman, there is the additional tax of being underestimated. I am routinely asked the questions men are not: Why will you survive? Why should you raise money? Why would you win? Four years later: three rounds of venture capital. Category-defining customers across multiple verticals. Thousands of patients supported. Recurring revenue. Staying power. I don’t disappear when it gets hard. I compound. That’s the climb.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I am obsessed with one question: What if fertility could be predicted and protected years before crisis? We can model heart attacks. We can forecast diabetes. Yet fertility remains reactive, emotional, and late. We are building the longitudinal dataset this field has never had — years before someone is struggling, not after. But data alone doesn’t change healthcare. Execution does. My superpower is implementation. I build inside complexity. I take models and make them operational inside messy, real-world systems. The mountain I am climbing is this: embed proactive fertility assessment into standard care so that prevention not panic becomes the norm. And once you can do that for fertility, you can do it for so much more.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
My legacy isn’t just about changing fertility care. It’s about changing who feels entitled to lead. I want my daughter and every woman watching to believe she can challenge institutions, question norms, and build what doesn’t yet exist. Not because she’s been burned, but because she sees a better way. Thirty years from now, I hope more women step forward earlier, think bigger, and move faster—confident that they belong at the table and capable of redesigning it.