Stephanie Massucco (EMBA ’25) Champions Innovation in Maternal Care with Visionary Venture ‘Mother&’ 

Stephanie Massucco (EMBA ’25) has packed a decade worth of significant life events into her time in the Executive MBA program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

Virtually all at once she paused a career track in San Francisco to move east permanently, earned an MBA from Darden, became a mother and launched a business venture.

“It was kind of a wild series of events,” she said.

This summer, Massucco is focusing squarely on putting her new venture – Mother& – on a path from entrepreneurial vision to business reality by participating as one of 23 founder teams in the i.Lab Incubator of Darden’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology. She believes that birth stories shape how people approach motherhood, and wants to champion the importance of a positive, personalized birth experience.

Stephanie Massucco (EMBA ’25) had her son during her first year at Darden.

Massucco originally considered getting an MBA because she felt she was missing some foundations of finance and business in her career. A paralegal by training, she had originally imagined a path toward law school but instead found herself pulled into the world of tech and venture capital in Silicon Valley where she worked alongside high profile executives, including as an executive assistant at Founders Fund and most recently at Instacart during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the encouragement of a women’s leadership group led by Janelle Hallier called The Association, where members are provided a “Personal Board of Directors,” Massucco applied to Darden. She indeed got her bearings in finance while attending the program, but she found more than she expected at the School.

“I would’ve never thought about becoming an entrepreneur, never thought of myself as a leader,” she said. “Honestly, I think I probably would not have pursued this idea had I not gone to Darden.”

Even before the birth of her son, Massucco remembers discussing the lack of a more supportive birthing environment out there, and her idea for creating that space, with her Learning Team during orientation at Darden. Going through a challenging labor and delivery experience informed and sharpened her vision, and she began pursuing her idea seriously: a boutique-like birthing and postpartum space that offers a “bring your own midwife” model, focusing on personalized care and proximity to the hospital. It’s designed to put mothers first in their birth story.

Massucco says that many expectant women want more personalized options that hospitals don’t necessarily provide.

“There is a gap in the market and a real opportunity to serve women better,” she said, noting that maternal care deserts are growing, and while birthing centers are trying to fill that gap, 70% of U.S. birth centers are within just 10 states. “Expanding options is crucial. Women deserve choices, and the system must evolve to deliver them.”

Through Darden’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, she found encouragement and structure.

“I remember when I first thought of starting a business, I sat on it for over a year. Because dreaming that big, pursuing a venture of my own – those ideas seemed distant, almost impossible. And yet, through this experience, I’ve come to see that big dreams are not only possible, but more than that, they’re necessary,” she said.

She credits Jason Brewster, director of venture programs for the Batten Institute, for believing in the concept in the first place and professors Paul Matherne and Les Alexander for helping her drive it forward.

Mother& is gaining momentum. Massucco is scouting locations in Richmond after consulting with a variety of maternal care experts. She is participating in Darden’s i.Lab Incubator this summer to accelerate the venture’s progress. “It’s really happening, and it’s something I very much believe in,” she said.

The i.Lab Incubator is a summer program at Darden that guides entrepreneurs from across UVA from their idea to market readiness through tailored mentorship, workshops, peer collaboration and $5,000+ funding per venture. In addition to the support from Darden’s entrepreneurial community, her fellow mothers in the program helped her along the way.

Stephanie Massucco’s original Learning Team at Darden, (left to right) Zachary Rubenfeld, Nick Diaz, Elizabeth Berry, Sean Harper, and Massucco (Michael Atkinson not pictured). 

“I think that community was probably one of the best things about being a mother at Darden,” Massucco said. As part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Darden, she made a presentation at the Tom Tom Festival E-Cup competition in Charlottesville this spring. Although childcare fell through and she found herself scrambling beforehand, she was a finalist in all three tracks of the competition, Concept, Discovery and Launch, and winner of the first. “Even that week I was thinking, ‘Should I not be doing this?’” she said. “But on the other side of it, even as some of the women at Darden said, it’s so important for your child to see you thriving in other areas of your life, too.”

Reflecting on her journey at Darden, from the beginning when she felt torn between seemingly conflicting modes of her life – her former career in San Francisco, the prospect of motherhood, and the commitment that Darden would require – to now, Massucco realizes that she sees that ‘those worlds aren’t mutually exclusive. They can coexist.’ It is a sentiment that subtly challenges the traditional narratives that often force women to choose, implicitly or explicitly, between ambition and fulfillment. In Massucco’s case, Darden provided not just a degree, but a space to explore and redefine her own definition of success.