Dr. Senan Ebrahim started Delfina, the company of which he is the Chief Executive Officer, for one reason: to get ahead of the problems women can face in pregnancy, rather than try to fix them after they’ve started. And it all started with a simple question: “As one of the highest income nations,” he asked, “that spends the most on pregnancy care…Why do we have the worst outcomes?”
The answer? The American healthcare system is reactive instead of proactive, nowhere more so than in the maternity ward. “In pregnancy,” he said, “it’s because too much of our spending and too much of our intervention is after it’s too late.”
Enter Delfina. Dr. Ebrahim started the company in 2021 after eight years at Hikma Health, a company he founded in 2017 to help assist Syrian refugees, and for which he served as CEO through 2019. Prior to that, he attended Harvard, both as an undergraduate and for graduate school, where he received an MD and a PhD, the latter in computational neuroscience. He subsequently led a medical anthropology project as a Fellow for the university in the Peruvian Andes, studying patients and healers in indigenous communities.
All of which to say, Dr. Ebrahim is something beyond your average high achiever, and it’s encouraging news for mothers- and fathers-to-be that he’s turned his sights on improving pregnancy care here at home. Medicine has been his passion since, as a child, he saw someone on the streets of his hometown of San Francisco with goiter, a condition his Syrian mother recognized as an illness that can be triggered by a lack of nutrition—not a fate that he thought was supposed to happen in America. From that single moment, he’s devoted his life to making sure it doesn’t.
Now, Delfina is leveraging AI to help improve outcomes for pregnant patients, but not in a one-size-fits-all manner. “Where we excel is not just the AI itself,” Dr. Ebrahim said in a 2024 interview, “but tailoring the understanding that a doula or a clinician has of her patient and what she truly needs, and being able to use that 20 minutes with her optimally to get her to have a healthier outcome.”
That said, Dr. Ebrahim knows AI is not the solution for everything, and has ensured Delfina is able to distinguish between what’s appropriate for an AI chatbot and what’s appropriate for a medical professional. At the same time, he encourages would-be entrepreneurs to follow his lead and “jump in with both feet” if the urge strikes. Beyond all the accolades and accomplishments, he remains a dreamer. “It takes a certain kind of romantic self-belief that goes along with that conviction to say, you know what, it doesn't matter that most companies fail,” he said. “We're going to be the company that makes it.”
