MN Cup winner Momease launches clinical study at U, braces for word of federal grant

When Ashley Mooneyham had her first baby in 2021, breastfeeding was fast and easy. Then she had to return to work and rely on a breast pump.

Suddenly, it took 30 minutes to produce a quarter-bottle of milk.

Frustrated, she looked for solutions and found studies showing that manual massage and heat helped pumping mothers express more milk.

“But when I went to look to purchase a product that would let me do this, I was shocked to see there was no product that used warmth and pressure,” Mooneyham said. “I said, ‘Well this product doesn’t exist. If I don’t pursue it, it will never exist.’”

She now has a contract manufacturer to produce the Momease Solutions bra. However, despite being this year’s MN Cup winner and winning seed money and grants, Momease is far from a fully functioning company, and Mooneyham is well aware that 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years.

Still, Mooneyham has relevant experience and she leveraged her network to build out a plan to disrupt the $1.3 billion nursing bra industry.

“I am an accidental entrepreneur but am certainly grateful all these things lined up for Momease,” said Mooneyham, a Duluth native with a doctorate in microbiology, immunology and cancer biology from the University of Minnesota.

Mooneyham has helped dozens of medical device firms secure $25 million in research grants and venture capital investments. But while she’s always been comfortable with science, she was not as confident about starting a business, she said.

Mooneyham first turned to colleagues, in this case her bosses — brothers who happen to be serial entrepreneurs and co-founders of St. Paul-based Superior Medical Experts, which helps fund 60 medical device startups a year.

She emailed Keith and Kevin Kallmes her business idea and a slideshow of market research.

“I wanted to see, does this have legs?” she said.

“Yes. It has legs!” said Keith Kallmes, noting he was impressed Mooneyham had already surveyed 1,200 mothers on Facebook to see if they too suffered with uncomfortable and slow-performing breast pumps after returning to work.

Nearly every respondent said yes. Even though Mooneyham shared the experience, she was shocked at the results.

“I was hoping for 50 [responses], and we got more than 1,200. That was an incredibly validating moment that proved the problem we are trying to address. It [showed] it’s not just a problem for me, it’s a pervasive problem,” Mooneyham said.

She partnered with Jenny Lynch, who successfully founded two nonprofits and the two got to work, snagging lessons along the way from entrepreneurial experts, attorneys, Home Depot, fish tanks and even “Shark Tank.”

Since incorporating Momease in 2021, the startup and its prototype have won a slew of state, local and national awards.

A year ago, it won a $288,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH). By December, it had received two state grants worth $47,599. Last month the founders scooped up the $50,000 first prize at the University of Minnesota’s MN Cup contest and another $25,000 from the Carlson Family Foundation.

Next month, Momease learns if it won a second National Institute of Health grant, this one for $250,000.

If selected, the money wound fund a clinical study at the U’s Human Milk and Nutrition Research laboratory. The grant would pay for the fabrication of 100 custom-made prototype bras and stipends for 100 new moms to test them.

Kevin Kallmes said Mooneyham took a critical step in getting an outside perspective.

“On any innovation like this, usually, you have to make sure that there’s going to be a large market size,” Kevin said. “I did look over [Mooneyham’s] numbers. And it is extraordinary what she could access. Definitely in the range of hundreds of thousands of mothers, which would be in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue just from the obtainable [domestic] market. That is enough for me to say, go for it.”

The Kallmes brothers decided to become investors and rallied others to raise a first-round infusion of $250,000.

“We were the first investors of Momease. We are proud of that,” Kevin Kallmes said.

Ellen Demerath, a professor in the U’s Division of Epidemiology & Community Health, is also convinced Momease is onto something. So much so she took on the clinical research study to test the efficacy of the Momease bra in her milk lactation laboratory. She also helped write a grant proposal to NIH.

“The problem with the science of lactation is that it was mostly implemented in dairy animals because of [their] commercial importance,” Demerath said. “But the whole idea that we want to make sure we have women human beings [receiving] great supportive best practices for breastfeeding? We haven’t been there ... And yet it’s really important ... with women having to go back to work so early.”

To shore up the business side of Momease, Mooneyham sought out business mentors. She contacted Busy Baby founder Beth Fynbo after watching her pitch her Oronoco-based company on the TV show “Shark Tank.”

“We’ve since become fast business friends,” Mooneyham said.

Fynbo was in the baby products space and was a prior MN Cup division prize winner. She turned down the “Shark Tank” investment she won, deciding to go it alone with her younger brother, Eric. By 2021, Busy Baby had nearly a dozen patents, 500,000 customers and more than $10 million in lifetime sales.

“I was super excited to talk to Ashley, find out where she was and offer her lessons learned from my journey,” said Fynbo, who immediately suggested Momease hire a patent attorney and do a patent search. It’s a step Fynbo was never warned to do — until after she’d sunk $16,000 into her company.

Mooneyham hired Fynbo’s intellectual patent attorney at Headland Law & Strategy in Rochester. He proved extra helpful because of his engineering background.

At the same time, Lynch focused on Momease’s website, creating a document-storage system, incorporating the company and registering Momease with the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office. She and Mooneyham also hired new business attorney Dan Buechler at New Counsel in Minneapolis.

Buechler declined to discuss Momease, but said many entrepreneurs get so excited about all the potential versions of their new product, they lose focus. Or they only rely on plentiful free online advice and don’t hire the patent attorney, certified public accountant or the business attorney — all experts who can simplify processes.

Early stage entrepreneurs should also consider what they might do if someone suddenly wants a stake in the venture, he said.

Mooneyham and Lynch followed his advice. And they followed the advice of the Headland patent attorney, who suggested they use simple “off-the shelf” items such as a fish-tank pump to make their first prototype.

The end result “looked crazy,” she said.

“But it doesn’t need to look pretty because you are just trying to prove the concept and get started. Its progress,” said Mooneyham. “We learned that what I initially had in mind as an idea was a little too complicated to engineer into a product that would be affordable.”

Contract manufacturer Kablooe Design in Coon Rapids gave that first prototype a more polished look.

By that time, Mooneyham had given birth to her second child and was able to test the new product.

“I have been able to collect a full bottle of breast milk in half the time with the Momease bra” Mooneyham said. “So both of my children have been involved in our business trajectory.”