The night Laura Modi decided she was going to launch her infant formula company Bobbie, she was out drinking with her friends in a pub back in Ireland, her home country. It was New Year’s Eve, she recalls. My daughter was one. I had already done my research, and I was so convinced I wanted to do this. But the words, she says, had never come out of her mouth before. I’m in a pub in Cork, and I proclaimed to my friends that I was going to start a company.
And typical Irish, they ordered drinks, they started cheering, like, This is so exciting. I viscerally remember that helping me because I came back to the States and I handed in my notice. Once it came out of my mouth, I had no choice but to go do it. It might sound like a crazy way to start what is now one of the fastest growing companies in America—Bobbie feeds more than 500,000 babies a year—and Modi herself admits, I never ever in my life thought I would ever start a powdered milk company. It was never a dream. I was in tech, and I loved my career. But giving birth to her first child in 2016 (she now has four children: Mary, Colin, Owen, and Etta, her youngest, who was born earlier this year in 2024) changed everything. Bouts of mastitis had left her struggling to exclusively breastfeed, and she felt let down by what she found in the ingredients list of the formulas on the market. What really gnawed at Modi was the conflicting pressures put on moms when it came to breastfeeding their newborns yet also returning to work as soon as possible. I remember continuing to see this statement, which said the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that new mothers breastfeed exclusively for six months, she says. And then on the other side, nobody is giving mothers the paid leave to be able to do so. That conflict wrecked me. She continues, I felt like I became an activist in ways that I never really was before. I cared about what my daughter ate, about the society she was being raised in.