Stephiney Foley ’09 has launched Yuzi, a wellness startup aiming to support families during the exhausting, challenging days that follow childbirth. Foley graduated from West Point and worked for the U.S. Army for more than seven years, serving as a platoon leader in Afghanistan and Hawaii and a supply chain and operations officer in California.
When it comes to war, Foley said, the expectation is that it’s going to be tough and you need to brace yourself. That’s not the message for new parents.
“With motherhood, the media, movies, everything out there says it’s a rosy, beautiful thing — which it is — but our society doesn’t talk about the messiness of motherhood and parenthood,” Foley said.
Seattle-based Yuzi launched in September and the team is bootstrapping the effort while starting fundraising. The target customers include some of the parents of the more than 3.6 million babies born in America annually.
Last year, Foley was hand-selected as a winner of the Adams Keegan Sponsor a Grad contest, where she won a paid ticket to attend the 2023 West Point Entrepreneur Summit in San Francisco for submitting a pitch deck on her startup Yuzi. She was also featured as an Athena Angels panelist at the summit, where she represented West Point Women Entrepreneurs in telling her startup story. She is a board member of the Athena Angels, who support service academy women entrepreneurs through mentoring, education, promotion, and investing to help start and grow successful businesses and startups.
