Dr. Ronak Mehta, a physician-turned-entrepreneur from Madison, has been named one of Inc.’s Female Founders 500 for her venture, Nerdbugs.
Mehta founded Nerdbugs to make intimidating medical concepts more approachable to kids. It sells plushie organs inspired by a children’s book Dr. Mehta wrote while in medical school.
The recognition by Inc. highlights women entrepreneurs who came out from the COVID-19 pandemic with impactful ventures in advertising, education, engineering, health, financial services, retail and many other industries.
Now with over 100,000 units sold worldwide, Nerdbugs looks to widen its impact to “make the hard stuff easy and the scary stuff a little bit more friendly,” Dr. Mehta said.
Her journey started in medical school where she wrote a whimsical Dr. Seuss-esque children’s book on organs. While she didn’t have the requisite skills to bring her initial idea to success, the idea of making health education more approachable stayed with Dr. Mehta.
“I wasn’t a marketer so I just put it out in the world and just thought it would take off but it didn’t,” Dr. Mehta said.
The idea continued to nestle in the back of her mind for close to a decade. She knew that she wanted to make health education and hospital stays less intimidating, and stuck with the idea. Dr. Mehta soon decided to take the characters from her book and transform them into kid-friendly stuffed toys with cartoonish looks.
Nerdbugs has found critical success and partnered with Amazon, Chase and Lenovo. It now looks towards reaching more children through partnerships with children’s hospitals around the country.
“It seems to have related to people, not only on an individual level, but a lot of major companies who have been so drawn to the mission of how can we make these very challenging times a little bit brighter for people that are hospitalized, whether they’re adults or kids,” she said.
In 2023, Nerdbugs partnered with the Women’s Business Enterprise National Community Impact Project. In the partnership, Nerdbugs were donated to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. Later it continued with the same donation effort at children’s hospitals in Denver, Cincinnati and D.C.
“How can we partner and get into every single children’s hospital, transplant center, cancer center in the country? That would be an absolute dream of mine,” Dr. Mehta said.
Other plans are to rerelease the children’s book Dr. Mehta made in medical school and develop a child-friendly health educational curriculum to become the “Disney of health.”
