On Sept. 12, Leslie eLab’s Female Founders Lunch series welcomed Laura Katz (Steinhardt ’16), founder and CEO of Helaina, to share her journey of building a biotech company that pushes the boundary of what food can do for health.
From Food Science to Biotechnology
Katz began her career developing alternative dairy and meat products before teaching food science at NYU. The idea for Helaina emerged during a subway ride, when she heard a podcast about the black-market trade in breast milk. She recognized an unmet need among parents, cancer patients, bodybuilders and immunocompromised individuals seeking the potential health benefits of human milk, many of whom rely on unregulated sources.
Refining the Vision
At first, Katz and her team considered developing a smart bottle to detect pathogens in shared milk. Her mentors helped her recognize that such a tool would be only a temporary fix rather than a long-term solution, which led her to shift her focus to protein production — using biotechnology to replicate human milk safely and at scale, extending consumer’s immune, gut and brain health benefits beyond infancy.
Building the Team
With the problem identified, Katz strategically built Helaina’s team, starting with yeast engineers and molecular biologists before bringing on process engineers, chemists, immunologists and regulatory experts.
Katz also emphasized that founders must take an active role instead of just hiring, particularly in a company’s early stages when resources are limited.
“The founder should be the best salesperson. We didn’t bring in our first salesperson until last fall.”
Tools for Scale
Today, Helaina runs hundreds of experiments weekly, using tools like Benchling, Snowflake and Gemini to analyze data and increase production efficiency fivefold while cutting costs by the same factor.
Advice for Founders
Katz closed the conversation with six advice for aspiring entrepreneurs:
- Stay accountable. No one else is responsible for your company.
- Talk to customers. Early interviews are critical for validation.
- Refine your pitch. Make it second nature and keep it under five minutes.
- Listen first. Let investors explain their thesis before tailoring your response.
- Find mentors. Surround yourself with people two or three stages ahead to anticipate challenges.
- Growth mindset. Where you are today isn’t good enough for six months from now.
