Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Khylir Patton of IYA Inc., an on-demand maternal wellness platform giving moms instant access to vetted birth workers and AI-powered support throughout pregnancy and postpartum.

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

IYA is an on-demand maternal wellness platform giving moms instant access to vetted birth workers and AI-powered support throughout pregnancy and postpartum.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to launch your company?

’ve always been an entrepreneur. Before launching IYA, I built and managed multiple businesses with ease until I became pregnant. The moment I entered motherhood, everything came to a screeching halt. Suddenly, the same drive and structure that helped me thrive in business couldn’t help me navigate pregnancy, postpartum recovery, or the emotional weight of becoming a mother.

Even with beautiful, unmedicated births—including one at home in a birthing pool; I felt underserved, unseen, and overwhelmed by how hard it was to find trustworthy, timely support. That wake-up call became my mission.

I launched IYA to build the kind of maternal care experience I wish existed for me: accessible, on-demand, culturally competent, and rooted in real community. Mothers deserve more—and IYA is my answer to that.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Moms are falling through the cracks. They can’t easily find support, they don’t know where to go for help, and the U.S. maternal health system is overwhelmed, fragmented, and failing them.

IYA solves this by giving moms on-demand access to a vetted “village”—midwives, doulas, lactation consultants, mental-health therapists, pelvic-floor specialists, and more—along with AI-powered maternal monitoring and symptom support. It’s the modern village brought to life.

What gets me excited every day is knowing that we’re building something that will change how mothers experience pregnancy and postpartum. Every feature we design has a mom’s face, story, and struggle behind it. That keeps me going.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

One of my biggest challenges was stepping into tech without a technical background and still needing to build a high-quality, HIPAA-compliant, scalable platform. The odds aren’t always in favor of Black women in tech, especially in the maternal health space.

I overcame it by becoming an obsessive learner, surrounding myself with the right mentors, joining accelerators like Embarc, hiring globally, and doing whatever it took to build momentum. I said “yes” to being a beginner and let grit carry me the rest of the way.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We are in beta testing right now, onboarding providers across Florida, and preparing to publicly launch the AI Doula experience—our smart maternal support system that integrates with wearables and helps moms monitor their pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and emotional wellbeing.

From there, IYA will expand city by city, starting with Tampa Bay, rolling into Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami, and then scaling nationwide. Our vision is to become the #1 on-demand maternal care platform in the U.S.—a trusted home for mothers and the providers who care for them.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Start before you feel ready. Perfection is a delay tactic. Build the smallest version of your idea, test it with real users, and let their feedback shape your next move. Momentum beats perfection every time.

And protect your energy—your belief in the vision is the engine. Everything else can be fixed, hired for, or iterated on.

Why Florida?

And protect your energy—your belief in the vision is the engine. Everything else can be fixed, hired for, or iterated on.