Modi: Bobbie pitched 64 investors for initial seed round, getting 4 yeses
Laura Modi · Bobbie: Laura Modi. How a Baby Formula Startup Took Market Share From Two Industry Giants · Aug 17, 2026 · at 35:22
Laura Modi is the co-founder and CEO of infant formula startup Bobbie. She is recounting the process of raising the company's initial institutional seed round while pregnant.
0:00 / 0:31exact quote · 31.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I spoke to 64 investors. Every day I was on the phone making introductions, driving all across San Francisco with my baby bump, and pitching Bobby, and it, you know, the other things that happened during this period I hired a designer to develop the first look and feel and the logo. We designed the packaging. It was the hustle towards a pitch. But ultimately, after 64 pitches, most of them said no, and four of them said yes.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Laura Modi
Modi: Bobbie originally launched in the US positioned as a supplement
“Bobby brought it over as a pilot and decided to make what I thought was a very smart decision to position it as a supplement, as a companion formula to breast milk, which means that it moved out of the category as being the sole nutrition, and now it was in th…”
Bobbie halted new customer orders during shortage against board advice
“I called my board. I'm going, look, here's a little bit of the dilemma. Most of them were like, this is crazy. Just keep the growth going. Like, these moments don't come around often. Like, great moment for the brand. But I went to bed that night, and I rememb…”
Modi: FDA issued a national recall of Bobbie's pilot product
“And they issued a national recall. Right there and then. Issued a national recall of what was a pilot”
Modi: Anyone claiming an accurate pre-launch forecast is lying
“And anyone who says before they launch that they're setting a forecast they believe is accurate is totally lying. You're going out on a hope and a whim that there will be good reception to this and it will take off.”
Modi: Regulated legacy companies must engage polarizing leaders neutrally
“And if we are building a legacy business, and we're doing this right, it will mean that we're going to be dealing with characters that are polarizing, it will mean we're going to be dealing with different administrations along the way, and our job is to remain…”
Modi: US infant formula standards had not been updated since the 1980s
“The European nutritional standards that were governed by the EC were updating those standards every four to five years. And then I did the comparison to that over here in the US, and I realized the last time that the US updated their nutritional standards was …”