Our storyWe build smart tech for new moms
Lilu creates products that support parents through the transition to new parenthood. We started with breastfeeding and pumping because it is one of the hardest parts, and one of the least served by technology.
We’re Adriana C. Vázquez Ortiz and Sujay Suresh Kumar, engineers from MIT and Penn. We hail from Mexico and India respectively, and we met during our graduate programs at UPenn, where we were labmates working on creative robotics projects together.
Having watched friends and colleagues struggle with breast pump technology, we set out to understand the problem properly. We spent hundreds of hours on research, spoke with hundreds of moms in person and surveyed thousands more. What we found was that pump technology was severely outdated, and that the same pain points came up again and again.
Over the years, we’ve developed a work partnership built on trust, candor, and a shared commitment to getting the product right. We listen closely to parents, to our users, and to what the market is telling us — and then we challenge each other’s assumptions about what to do with what we’ve learned. Ideas at Lilu never move forward without being questioned, and tested by users and experts.
And we have never built any of it alone. We have been extraordinarily lucky to work with people who believed in this mission and worked hard at it — engineers, designers, lactation experts, marketers and operators who each made the products better for moms. Some are still here, many have moved on to other things. You all know who you are, and we are grateful to every one of you.