This Veterans Day, HITLAB honors Army veteran Dave Esra, founder and CEO of HITLAB-verified company BobiHealth, who says making pregnancy safer matters more to him than anything he did in uniform.
Sarah and I were older when we got pregnant with Cooper. She had a previous complicated pregnancy and was also diagnosed with gestational diabetes. We were constantly worried about what could go wrong, and we had multiple occasions when something felt off, and we didn’t know what to do. Often this meant we were spending another night in the ER.
Dave Esra spent 22 years as an Army infantry officer, including a deployment to some of Afghanistan’s most dangerous districts. The nights that set his current mission, though, were at home, during his wife Sarah’s high-risk pregnancy with their son, Cooper: awake at 2 a.m., trying to decide whether what was happening was serious enough to go in.
Today Dave leads BobiHealth, a company built so that fewer families face that question alone. He admits it is hard to explain how a retired infantry officer came to run a women’s health company. To him, the line is straight.
In the Army, his job was to bring every soldier home to their family. At BobiHealth, it is to make sure every mother gets home too.
The families Dave served alongside are among those most at risk. Military families are three times more likely to experience adverse pregnancy events]. That is a risk comparable to the country’s most underserved communities, even though these families have health coverage. Pregnant veterans can also struggle to get maternal mental health care through the VA.
The national picture is no better. According to the CDC Maternal Mortality Review, approx. 85% of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are considered preventable and complications such as preterm birth can affect a family for life.
At BobiHealth, the connection to service runs beyond its founder. One co-founder is a military spouse, and several of its providers serve in the Reserves or have served before.
Dave planned to stay in the military as long as it was still fun. He stayed 22 years. “I always felt that service was my calling,” he says.
In Afghanistan, his team supported local governance and police training in districts where attacks were so frequent that the contractors hired to train Afghan police, many of them former U.S. officers, weren’t allowed to go out. So the team flipped the model. Police chiefs sent cohorts of officers to the base, where they were housed, fed and kept safe while they trained in marksmanship and first aid and sat through an ethics class that Dave taught himself.
For the ethics class, I tried to communicate the importance of establishing rapport and trust in the community. I’m now learning how vital that is while building a company in healthcare.
Afterward, Taliban activity in the region dropped significantly. Years later, at Fort Bragg, Dave found the program written into formal Department of Defense governance strategy as a best practice. He took a rule from it that he still works by: an idea earns its place when the results prove it out.
Corporate America came next. Building project management organizations for large companies brought success, but not the shared purpose he had known in uniform.
The Army taught Dave that good intentions are not enough. You have to prove what works. This year, BobiHealth launched a pilot and clinical study with HITLAB and a second pilot with a federally qualified health center, building the evidence that health systems and public payers require.
The need does not stop at the U.S. border. Providers in Uganda and Nigeria are “begging us for it,” Dave says, but patients earning around $200 a year can’t pay, so BobiHealth is reaching out to nonprofits to close the gap.
Dave says this work matters more to him than anything he did in the military. “There’s this big, giant problem, and it’s so within reach to solve it,” he says. “Let’s make pregnancy safer.”
Dave Esra will join HITLAB at the Fall 2026 Innovators Summit, December 1–3 in New York City. BobiHealth is looking for partners to join its mission. To learn more or explore a partnership, contact HITLAB.
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