Cleo CEO Madhavi Vemireddy leads from experience as a family caregiver

As the CEO of caregiving platform Cleo, Madhavi Vemireddy spends her days lending support to caregivers. And she knows all too well how badly they need it. 

"In 2010, I was pregnant with my eldest son. I had a high risk pregnancy, and he was born six weeks premature," she says. "He ended up having a rare congenital heart condition, and at nine months, he needed open heart surgery. After the surgery, he was hitting his milestones, he was walking at age two and we thought he would just catch up. But socially, he wouldn't play with other kids and he wasn't talking yet." 

Ahead of kindergarten, Vemireddy and her husband were told her son was on the autism spectrum, a diagnosis no other pediatrician had given them previously. She and her husband discovered the resources and support available to family caregivers weren't sufficient for their needs, and they used those experiences and frustrations to create their own, eventually founding Care Tribe in 2019. 

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"Being a caregiver really opened our eyes to the fact that our healthcare system does not support families to the extent that it needs to," Vemireddy says. "It's not just about the clinical interventions, but everything else around that — early intervention, IEPs at school, the therapists you're going to need and your treatment plans." 

Care Tribe focused on the family caregiver experience, providing employer-sponsored caregiving services to employees. The team eventually combined forces with Cleo, which at the time was solely focused on pregnancy care and parenting support. In May of 2022, Vemireddy joined the Cleo team as chief clinical officer, and was eventually tapped to be CEO of the platform this year. 

"Instead of thinking about partnership, we really needed to think about essentially acquisition and coming together," Vemireddy says. "How do we then really understand where families are and where they need support?" 

Read more: 'There's a lot of guilt': The emotional burden of caregiving 

At Cleo, Vemireddy and her team have focused on this work, steadily expanding the spectrum of care that the platform offers to clients. Today, Cleo provides caregiving support for every step of the journey, continuing to offer prenatal, pregnancy and newborn care, all the way through elder care resources.

The goal, Vemireddy says, is to ensure the caregiver is maintaining their own health and well-being, in order to provide the best care for their loved ones. Cleo research has found that 41% of their clients already show signs of depression and anxiety due to caregiving, and 60% say they feel isolated in their experience. 

Through care coordinators, clients can let go of responsibilities like doing research and finding resources, and instead just make the best decision for their families. It's a sense of relief that Vemireddy knows well. 

"I feel overwhelmed — there's all the things I need to do for my son, there's all this stuff I need to do for work, and on top of that, I have to maintain our household. It's an area that we focus on a lot at Cleo," she says. "Cleo is essentially the front door to not only the services we provide, but also helping navigate families to other relevant benefits. You can't expect to take care of your family if you're not taking care of yourself."