Preterm birth affects one in ten babies in the United States, and for the smallest and most fragile among them, what they are fed in those first critical weeks can determine whether they survive and how well they thrive. The science has long pointed to mother’s own milk as the gold standard. The problem has been concentration: preterm infants need more nutrients than full-term milk provides at standard volume, and the current solution, adding formula fortifiers, introduces the very risks it is meant to solve. On this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet Beth Schinkel, a neonatal intensive care nurse and nutritionist who spent years watching babies get sick from formula fortifiers and decided to build a better answer. Her company, Mother’s Milk is Best, has developed a passive osmotic device that concentrates a mother’s own milk without adding anything foreign to it. The FDA has granted breakthrough technology designation. Clinical trials are underway. And the New York Angels, co-led by member Ray Farrell, have backed her seed round. Ray’s involvement is personal in a way that does not happen often in angel investing. He and his wife raised 26-week-old quadruplets in the NICU, born between a pound and a half and two pounds, navigating the exact risks that Beth’s device is designed to prevent. He heard her pitch and recognized the problem from the inside. Together Beth and Ray discuss how a passive osmotic device works and why its simplicity is a feature rather than a limitation, how Beth secured millions in non-dilutive NIH and SBIR funding before approaching angels and why the angel capital was still essential to unlocking it, what a billion-dollar total addressable market looks like when your initial customer is a NICU, and what early-stage investors actually contribute beyond the check. Staying with us after the main conversation is Peter Bodenheimer, the new Executive Director of the New York Angels, who brings a rare perspective to the role: he has been a founder, an investor, and an accelerator partner. He shares where he is focusing first, why he believes angel groups get a bad reputation for wasting founders’ time, and what he thinks it takes to make an investor-founder relationship genuinely useful after the money is wired.

Learn more about Mother’s Milk is Best and about joining or applying to the New York Angels at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.