MBA Mama Entrepreneur Kellianne Kelly Presents Her Start-up Idea: Nutribridge

Kellianne with members of her Cornell MBA team after presenting NutriBridge at the Hult Prize Foundation, an organization whose mission is to solve global social challenges through crowdsourcing ideas and solutions from the world’s best and brightest students.

As we kick off 2016, we are excited to share with our community that Kellianne Kelly, our December MBA Mama of the Month, has spent the last nine months with a group of friends at Johnson’s Graduate School of Management exploring and uncovering a highly interesting, impactful, and lucrative market that has a very special place in her heart. As a result, Kellianne and her classmates have become co-founders of NutriBridge.

NutriBridge is a nourishment company, aiming to source and deliver medical-grade human milk to Neonatal Intensive Care Units (“NICU”) and Bioscience companies. Kellianne’s team initially conceived of the concept as an avenue to address the severe human milk shortage in the NICUs in the US.

72% of mothers of NICU babies are unable to provide their infants with an exclusive human milk based diet — which is medically recommended as optimal nutrition for an infant.

Currently, hospitals use non-profit milk banking relationships to provide donor milk to NICU babies. This donor milk provides about 10% of what babies need to maintain exclusive human milk diets in the NICU. The altruistic donor based model for human milk although honorable, lacks capacity to address the enormous need that NICUs face.

At NutriBridge, Kellianne and her co-founders aim to build a scalable platform for the sourcing and delivery of human milk. Enabling not only NICUs to have access to sufficient human milk supply, but also enabling parental choice to parents of healthy babies in deciding whether to use human milk for their infants at home in the absence of a mother’s personal ability or desire to breastfeed.

The entire MBA Mama team is ecstatic about the possibilities for NutriBridge. We applaud Kellianne for having the vision, drive and focus necessary to develop the concept for this idea even while balancing a rigorous MBA program, two children, and a demanding investment banking recruiting process and summer internship. For those readers who may be feeling a lack of confidence about your potential for success as an MBA mom, let Kellianne be an inspiration. As we all think about our goals for the New Year, the possibilities for NutriBridge demonstrate that, with hard work and determination, anything truly is possible.