Muse Bio

Neil Sethi (0:00): I'm Neil Sethi. I'm head of platform product here at 1health. And I'm excited to be chatting with Tommy Kronmark, chief operating officer at Muse Bio, as a key flagship customer of the 1health platform and helping to get to market. Muse Bio is a revolutionary stem cell company that creates products, ingredients, recipes, and ultimately therapies out of the underutilized resource of women's menstrual blood. What stood in between you and your first compliance sample, to actually get to market with this amazing idea that Juliette had?

Tommy Kronmark (0:44): Yeah, it's a great question. So I would describe this — you know, really, Muse Bio started out of a very personal need, but also on the foundation of a lot of existing science and momentum in this space. There's over 20 years of foundational research and R&D on the menstrual stem cell, and many more decades of research and progress and even commercialization of stem cells and stem cell derived products and therapies. So the moment really was right, in that it was a convergence of, you know, maturation of the menstrual stem cell space, and then the science and the industry knowledge and regulation around stem cells in general, and then this personal need that Juliette had — and bringing that all together is ultimately where Muse Bio came from.

(1:36) Now, from the very inception, one of the things that was very important to us is we don't simply want to do research and advanced research. The only way that we're going to be able to bring the amazing qualities and potential that we're seeing in these stem cells broadly to the people is to have a business focused around this, and being able to build Muse Bio with that mindset at its heart. So we really set out to, you know, in the sort of Silicon Valley way — like how do we build MVPs? How do we move fast? How do we set up everything just efficiently and lean, while maintaining, you know, compliance with the incredibly challenging space that we're working in, both on the donor side and the stem cell side, and the regulations and local laws and requirements. It's an incredibly delicate place to be building, and we want to be able to bring this science and business mindset and working fast in this space. So that's really what was important to Muse Bio.

(2:44) And so when we set out to build, what's the, you know, this MVP process and the product and the infrastructure — really we were looking for partners that could free us up to work on the cutting edge science that we do, and ultimately allow us to become the stem cell company. We didn't want to be the plumbers connecting the — and building the software connecting, you know, donors to our CLIA labs to the electronic lab notebooks and the health records and all of that. We want to be able to work with partners that can help us build the infrastructure and the vision that we see, but ultimately build faster than if we were to build it ourselves. Then that frees us up to work on the cutting edge science, get more time in the lab, and really move that forward.

Neil Sethi (3:41): Yeah, that resonates so much with what we hear, right? You want to be the stem cell company. You don't want to have to be the expert in the plumbing. Where did this all break down when you looked at the economics and operations of building this?

Tommy Kronmark (3:56): Yeah, great question. You know, when we go out to build anything here really at Muse Bio, we're coming at it from two different approaches. There's the approach of going out there and learning — learning from any of the research you can do, reading case studies, reading actual reports, anything you can find online. There's also, arguably, the more valuable research of going out and talking to people — whether it's people that have built something like this before, whether it's talking with advisers, whether it's reaching out to competitor companies and seeing how they've navigated similar challenges, right? We learn as much as we can, but then we also take the approach of let's just build it and see what happens and see what breaks, right? A little bit of a learn-by-doing attitude. So there's a balance that we strike here.

(4:42) And I think when we look at how we built our original donor infrastructure and the donor eligibility program — of course, we wanted to just get into it and build this. This was a very core part of what we're doing here at Muse Bio. So we figured that this makes sense for us to dive right in. As we started to uncover layer after layer of what it would look like to actually build this — both in terms of like the infrastructure and the partners we would need to work with, and all of the compliance across cybersecurity and local laws and federal regulations — this part of the business that we're building out itself is an entire endeavor. It's an entire company on its own.

(5:29) So, we quickly started running into various challenges, tried to work through those. Like building anything, you're going to run into roadblocks and see how you can try and get around or get over those. We started to put together the framework of what this solution would look like. And, you know, really just before getting everything in place, we would uncover one more rock that would have another issue that we would need to navigate around. And then eventually we just took a step back and said, you know, this solution we're building — it's costing us a ton of time and effort. The solution is not elegant. We've got all of these like disparate pieces and all these roadblocks we're working around. There's got to be a better way. We're not the first people to invent this and to create this. So, how can we do this better?

(6:26) So, we really kind of took a step back, looked back at the whiteboard and said, these are the parts that we would ideally like to find a partner who's already done this or can do this better than we have, right? And it's with that mindset that we ended up going and searching for partners — whether it was a telehealth platform, whether it was the CLIA labs themselves and they had their own portal and their own system, whether it'd be partnering with an existing blood bank or biospecimen collection facility. We kind of put everything on the table, and then ultimately that's how we found 1health — which really has allowed us to build our vision of what the Muse Bio donor portal and the donor experience should be, and build it in our way, on a platform that was built exactly for what we're talking about here. So this was sort of the best of both worlds, in that we don't have to create and write the software and connect all of the pieces, and yet we still get to build the vision that we have in mind, and build it how we want to see it.

Neil Sethi (7:28): How did you use the tools and find 1health?

Tommy Kronmark (7:31): We knew we had a gap that we wanted to fill, and classically, if there was a gap that we wanted to fill, we would probably really rely on our network, and specifically try and talk to advisers or other companies in a similar space who have worked in similar problems to see how they have filled that gap, right? We value, you know, these referrals or recommendations from experienced people in our network very highly. We see that that's an incredible resource in how we build. But frankly, it's slow, and it's also — it's biased and it's limited, really. The exposure of what people have done in our network is a lot smaller than the full range of possibilities, right?

(8:19) So, we took a different approach, and it's something that I'm pretty proud of here at Muse Bio — that we are really just striving to be AI native from the start. So, the whole team — we're a lean startup. We don't have a huge team and we can't afford a huge team, but what we can afford are a full AI suite for everyone. So all of the premium models, and just building that culture around using these tools that help us be more efficient, productive and lean, right?

(8:57) So when we have a project like this, we'll certainly use a co-pilot, and we'll be working with that co-pilot, that AI tool, essentially as a thought partner as we're building out the project — to help pull in resources from online. How have other people done this? What are the considerations from the donor side, the regulatory side, the lab side? How do we build a solution? Making sure we're thinking about the full range of possibilities. So, it was in this exploration of how do we build out this donor management and donor eligibility platform — and if we look at all of the different functions we need to cover, how can we find something to help fill that gap? And it was through a conversation with one of these co-pilot tools that we eventually came across the 1health platform, and really started to dive in. And then as soon as I got on a call with the team there, realized that this was the perfect solution. It fit all of the gaps that we had, and that's exactly where we doubled down and started to build our platform on the 1health platform.

Neil Sethi (10:09): Yeah. Right on. What was that process as far as you recall? How did that flow?

Tommy Kronmark (10:14): Yeah, let me get into the specifics of that discovery moment a little bit. You know, I mentioned that we're using these AI tools really like thought partners and co-pilots for any of the projects that we're working on, right? So, we're in the process of setting up this donor eligibility program. It's at this time that we're really just trying to identify all of the individual gaps and fill them, right? So, we had a CLIA lab we were working with. We had all of the like cybersecurity and data pieces put together, but there were still some gaps — primarily around test requisition and ownership of results, and how do we navigate that as a California corporation, and how do we, you know, meet the requirements that are being set for us, but avoiding any of the, you know, gotchas and potholes that we need to avoid on like the liability exposure and some of these other requirements and compliance areas.

(11:17) So as we're building this — we're building it in real time — as we're learning new information, we're putting that into our co-pilot tool and we're making sure that we're tracking everything here. And you know, eventually we discovered that there was a pretty big, glaring gap that we were kind of uncovering as we were learning new information, and it was really around the inclusion of a third-party medical director. So having a California licensed physician to oversee our donor eligibility program, but specifically having them as a third party and not part of the Muse Bio organization. This was a key detail that is really buried within — not really even within any guidance document or any law. It's sort of like bridged between all of these other laws and guidance documents. So, you kind of have to look through all of them to get this picture of like, how do you actually build a solution here? And once we uncovered that, we realized that we're really going to need a much more thorough system than what we're building in house to be able to fill this gap.

(12:26) Right? So, it's in this exploration, and as we're uncovering new information and adding that to the co-pilot tool, that we started to really push on: how have other people done this in the past? And you know, maybe the tool would come back and say, well, you know, so-and-so company took a year to build something like this, and they did it like this, like this, and like that, and they have like paper records being sent in other places. And we're like, this is 2026. There's no way people are working with paper records and all these like crazy systems that aren't talking to each other. There must be a better way.

(13:04) So, we kept pushing for, you know, what is something that's fully digital, fully well-rounded, and can connect all of the different stakeholders — and fast. Also, we don't have a year to build an MVP. We have months, and let's build it as fast as we can. So it's kind of continuously uncovering new information and pushing for better and faster that ultimately we uncovered 1health as a solution that came out from the work with this co-pilot tool. And as we started to push more and more on this as a potential option, we saw that it really fit all of the gaps that we had and more — which meant that we can actually back off of this solution, build on top of the 1health platform that essentially was an already off-the-shelf solution for exactly what we needed, and then it let us focus on the other bottlenecks and constraints in the company.

Neil Sethi (14:01): That's amazing. And what I want to call out is that I believe this co-pilot — Gemini — sessions was around December 2025, something around that.

Tommy Kronmark (14:12): End of — very end of December. Exactly.

Neil Sethi (14:15): Yeah. So tell me a little bit about what ensued from that point.

Tommy Kronmark (14:20): Well, in classic startup fashion, we had a limited runway and runway pressures, and we knew that we needed to fundraise. And so we had identified some high value inflection points, they call them, but really just some exciting milestones that we needed to hit that would ultimately prove that the concept that we've built here — and the process and the infrastructure and the MVP — they work, and this is a real business worth building, right? So this is something we identified early on. We had a runway pressure. We knew that we had only so much time to build this. And so, you know, ultimately we started putting all the pieces together and figured what is the true MVP? What is the minimum viable product or process here that we can put in place to ultimately get to that end state, that milestone? Even if it's not the prettiest solution and the most built out, as long as we can get from A to B.

(15:24) And speed was a big decision factor for us. You know, I mentioned earlier that we were looking at case studies and talking to medical directors at other companies, and they were sharing that something that they had built in-house took them the better part of a year, or multiple years even — and that simply wasn't an option for us. So, we needed to find a faster way, and that was one of the real selection pressures that we had in terms of the tools and the partners that we ended up working with.

(15:54) And it's from that selection pressure that we did discover 1health and have been incredibly delighted. So, we first got on a call with the team at 1health in the end of December in 2025. We outlined our goals and the milestones and the specific scope that we needed. And whereas other companies were taking weeks to even set up this call and then quoting months of work, the team at 1health was able to get on the phone with me in the same day and essentially say that hey, we've done this before. We can build this in a matter of weeks, and all we need is X, Y, and Z and the go-ahead, and we're off to the races. And that was the easiest yes that we could have had. So we ended up working with 1health, and they delivered. They built the entire thing that we needed in the true MVP fashion — so not polished, but working. And then slowly over the next few months we were able to go from MVP to better, to even better, to great. Right.

Neil Sethi (17:00): Yeah. That's a remarkable story. Any other components, in plumbing or otherwise, that you were able to resolve?

Tommy Kronmark (17:08): Yeah, I can give you a few different examples of, you know, maybe where we started with 1health and then what we eventually realized that 1health can do far better than we can do if we did this in house. So really the origin, or the discovery story, came from the need for an ordering physician and a third-party medical director. So it's somebody with a California license to be a physician, and in a third-party relationship to Muse Bio, to handle overview of our donor eligibility program and ordering of these tests and interpretation of the results, with respect to the CLIA lab test results for eligibility. That was a big gap, and not an easy one for us to fill. So that's ultimately what we were looking for — somebody to help facilitate this relationship with a third-party physician. 1health has a platform that did that, and that's really where we started.

(18:11) So when I talk about the MVP, it was really the sort of the connector between all of these different stakeholders, right? The donors, the CLIA, the third party medical director, the Muse Bio team — and how does information flow between each of these? We layered that on top of our existing chain of custody, you know, data tracking and records, and the, you know, positive result notification, and our very crude donor portal at the time. But what we realized is these are systems that 1health has already built. So why don't we replace our, you know, crudely built MVPs with what 1health already has? So, 1health went from just being our, you know, connector and facilitator of a third party medical director, ultimately to the full donor portal experience — handling the full chain of custody from end to end, and the results notification piece, the full donor portal.

(19:12) And we even ended up doing at-home phlebotomy visits. We thought for the longest time that the way for us to get our donors cleared by these CLIA labs is ultimately to send them into a CLIA lab and have them get a blood draw and tested and cleared. And while it's more convenient than having them also come to our office, we were very encouraged when 1health brought the option to us that we can actually contract with an at-home phlebotomy group — and it's somebody that they already work with and can recommend, and their system is built around. So what we realized is not only is 1health our connector between the stakeholders that we know and that we need, they're actually bringing in new vendors and partners into our system that are already in their ecosystem, and it works beautifully. So we've started to really rely on 1health for helping us realize this vision that we've had for what this donor portal and the donor experience looks like.

Neil Sethi (20:18): Yeah. Wow, this is remarkable, and I appreciate you for recapping that. I'll end our conversation here with that, and next time we chat, to get into the build and the sprint to market, and the time to actually get your first paying client. This is beautiful. Thank you for your time, Tommy. Once again, Neil Sethi here with 1health and Tommy Kronmark. Thank you for your time today.

Tommy Kronmark (20:40): Thank you, Neil. It's been great to be here. Appreciate the work you guys do at 1health.

Neil Sethi (0:00): Hi everyone, Neil Sethi here, lead platform product manager here at 1health, and once again I have my man Tommy Kronmark here, chief operating officer at Muse Bio. What we talked about last time was a little bit about the discovery of 1health and how we connected our orbits, and now I want to get a little bit more into the actual product and the build.

Tommy Kronmark (0:23): It's wonderful to be here. Tommy Kronmark, and I'm co-founder and COO here at Muse Bio. And what is Muse Bio? Well, there are stem cells in menstrual blood, and Muse Bio takes those stem cells and develops ingredients, products, and therapeutics from them. And we're really leaning into the renewable and regenerative qualities of these stem cells to really push the frontier of what's possible. And we sit in this really wonderful position where we, on one side, have this incredible donor community we work with — and lean really into the women's empowerment and pushing the research in the women's health space — as well as the amazing stem cell science and stem cell industry, and being able to develop new products and new therapeutics from stem cells, which really is the future of medicine. So that's where Muse Bio sits.

(1:13) And from the very early days, we had such an incredible attention and momentum from the donor side of our business model, where we were getting consistent inbound messages from donors in and around SF — and really internationally, actually — about how they can contribute to the program and what that would look like. So one of the first milestones that we set here at Muse Bio was: how quickly can we set up a collection program to get more menstrual stem cells into our lab, and ultimately to do the research that we need to move the company forward? So that was the first thing that landed on my plate. Set up the donor collection system end to end. What does that look like? How do we do it compliantly, and how do we do it fast?

(2:00) We went first to try and build this ourselves. Every rock that we uncovered, we found new laws and new regulations and new things that we would have to work around. And essentially, what started as a really simple project turned into this monster of a project, with all of these different stakeholders we would need to manage, and software and infrastructure that we would need to build from scratch. And ultimately we realized: Muse Bio is a stem cell company. We're not a stakeholder management software and process company — like, we are a stem cell company. So let's work with the companies and the vendors in this space who can help fill these gaps.

(2:43) So we really just started looking wide and high around how can we build what we want to build without building it ourselves. Who can we work with to help fill some of these gaps? And it was through that research that we ultimately came across 1health, as a way for us not only to connect all of our stakeholders — from the donors to the CLIA lab to the ordering physician to the Muse Bio staff — but really, how do we then take that from an MVP and build something great on top of it. So with 1health, we've gone from just the basic connector framework to building a comprehensive and cohesive donor experience, with a donor portal and all of the notification and communications, including also conveniences such as at-home collection and at-home phlebotomy — and really facilitating this vision that we have and set out to do. And now we've got an end-to-end process. We've got a donor community that we work with regularly. We get cells coming into our lab and we're doing incredible research, and it's really facilitated by 1health helping us build this and helping us focus on the amazing stem cells that we get to work with every day.

Neil Sethi (3:57): That's beautiful. I love every time I hear that story. It just touches me. Now where my mind goes: taking the idea and the plumbing that you've identified — how you actually took it to market.

Tommy Kronmark (4:12): Absolutely. So when we set out to build this donor collection program, this was the first thing on my plate, and, you know, my background is in product development and operations, and I've worked at startups and I've worked at huge companies. So what I think about when I'm first tasked with something like this is: what does excellence look like? What does the best version of this look like? Let's define that, and then let's start paring it down. What can we cut away from this to get down to truly what the MVP — what are the minimum things that we actually need to have in place to go from A to B? So that's really where we started. We have this grand vision of what Muse Bio is going to be, and specifically what the donor experience is going to look like, and how do we actually do that. Now how do we pare that down to the most basic requirements that we need to meet, so that we can build this fast? Speed and excellence. So, those are really the two things that we kind of think about when we go and build out a project like this.

(5:12) So, we pared this down essentially to a list of about 10 requirements. Our solution needs to be able to do this, this, this, this, and this. There's all of these other nice things — not today. We'll take that on later, but let's minimally just capture these things. And so, I went out and started looking for solutions and partners that can help satisfy each of those. I found some partners that can satisfy maybe three or four of those requirements, and then others that can satisfy the others. Then we can start piecemealing different solutions. With 1health, it was clear that all 10 of those could be met. And when I first got on the call with the team, I explained exactly what we're doing. I explained this vision of excellence that we're building to, but ultimately the MVP where we need to start. And they made it clear to me that look, we can satisfy all 10 of those things. Give us two weeks — this is enough that we need for a project scope, and we're off to the races. And that was it. That's really how this started. We built the MVP in weeks, just as promised, and we're live. We did it. We made it happen. So that's the story from really just a project landing on my desk, to having something live and getting a working group of donors and stem cells in the lab.

Neil Sethi (6:31): Yeah, I love that. What would be required to cross off these 10 atomic items that you needed?

Tommy Kronmark (6:38): Yeah, I think without 1health, we probably would have needed to hire 10 people. Maybe down to only five people, but if it were only five people, they'd be like the best in the world at those five things. So, we would be paying a pretty penny if we wanted to build this ourselves. So working with a company like 1health really has helped us, you know, move fast and still realize the vision that we've had from the start. So it's been a wonderful partnership so far.

Neil Sethi (7:08): What has unlocked now as a result?

Tommy Kronmark (7:12): What has 1health unlocked? Well, maybe I'll just share where we started before we had 1health in place, and where we are now. So without 1health, we were operating under an IRB study, and we actually had a small group of donors who would regularly come into our office — and we had set up a collection site, and they would have to come into our office multiple times over the course of a month for various health check-ins and interviews, and ultimately for the collection, and then for a phlebotomy and CLIA lab appointment. And it was incredibly inconvenient for our donors and incredibly inconvenient for us, and it drained a lot of our time and resources in managing this. But this was the true MVP of how do we get stem cells in the lab.

(7:58) When we went to go and upgrade this, and we eventually built out the MVP platform on 1health, what this unlocked was a few things. First, it unlocked at-home collection and at-home phlebotomy, which gave convenience and comfort back to our donors, and it freed up our time away from having to organize the logistics of scheduling and in-office appointments. It also unlocked the ability to add new perks and new benefits to the program, and ultimately improve the donor experience end to end. That improved donor experience meant our donors were happy. They loved the program. They loved what they were getting out of it, and they kept coming back. So that donor retention metric is incredibly important for us, and that's something that it really unlocked with the 1health platform. And then finally, this gave us our time back. We got to focus on the stem cells and the cutting edge science we're doing in the lab, and that's really where we're focused here at Muse Bio. So being able to partner with a group like 1health to facilitate all of the other parts of the business — that really allows us to focus on the science in the lab. That's the real benefit that we're incredibly excited about.

Neil Sethi (9:13): Yeah. This changed the trajectory of your company and women's health. That's why I love chatting with you.

Tommy Kronmark (9:19): Thank you, Neil. It's wonderful to be here.