Redefine Possibility Vol. 4 - May 2025 | Page 10

Jennifer Realo is the Co-Founder and CEO of LERA Health, a digital women’s health start-up that places the proven transformational power of functional medicine at her fingertips. LERA has already received critical market recognition and accolades from the likes of HITLAB, TechStars, Springboard Enterprises, eMerge Americas, and Slauson & Co., and was a featured venture at World Trade Center Institute’s Women Spanning the Globe Conference in 2024. Prior to founding LERA in 2023, Jennifer, a CPA & MBA, worked in C-level roles across the health, financial, and tech industries

Jennifer, tell us what LERA does and the impact that you're looking to make in the market.

LERA is all about helping women take control of their health. It’s based in functional medicine. At the core, it's about each of us owning our health data, understanding what's happening in our bodies, and changing what's happening today in our health, and what can happen in our health future.

It's allowing us to get answers to our health in ways that, candidly, most women are really frustrated about. 84% of women today feel like their practitioners, whether it's their PCP or their GYN, are not properly equipped to help them navigate all the crazy changes that happen in our bodies, from our 20s, all the way to our 70s.

That stat, as alarming as it is, isn't so surprising.

The other thing I regularly hear from women is that their doctor pulls out the prescription pad and says “here, let me give you this antidepressant to deal with your symptoms” or “here, let's put you on birth control to deal with your PMS” to mask what's going on with your body at the root cause. That's incredibly frustrating.

Tell us more about functional medicine.

Functional medicine is about getting to the root cause of our health symptoms, understanding the why behind them and helping to solve those symptoms with holistic, natural solutions. It's working through lifestyle changes, looking at how we eat, how we sleep, how we manage stress and how we do (life). The combination of those critical lifestyle changes can make a huge difference in our health.

The challenge for women is we have to work really hard to get to these answers.

LERA does all the testing, we ask you a bunch of questions, and then we connect all these dots for you so that we come up with a very personalized plan that's specifically designed for you to help you get to be your best self today.

We've designed the key biomarkers that really matter for us as females, and work with every member to understand what's happening in our bodies today. We're coming up with what we believe is the key test that every female should be monitoring every year to really understand what's going on with their body.