The companion I wish I had.

Dear new parents (or those to be),

I’m Emily, and I’m building Fourth because it’s the companion I wish I had during my fragmented, frazzled, and seemingly unbounded postpartum journey.

In hindsight, my postpartum journey started even while our baby was gestating. Those 40 weeks of pregnancy were a mix of challenging, joyful, and anxious. But between the frequent OB visits and the knowledge that there was a finite end, it felt manageable. Postpartum was something else entirely: wandering into a fog of sleep deprivation and endless cries, grasping for threads of identity new and old, and trying to weave them into something that felt like mine.

It was much harder than pregnancy, in part because it was so much more opaque.

We call it the “fourth trimester,” the period Fourth Health is named after, but it is so much more than three months. The physical, mental, emotional, and relational shifts that begin when you welcome your baby, and extend long after, don’t quite have a home in our healthcare system. Beyond a single 6-week checkup, we are still very much figuring out how to care for mothers (and partners!) during this time.

So I started building Fourth Health: an app where families can track mom’s recovery alongside baby’s feeds, sleep, and diapers, with guidance and an AI companion woven in. It’s meant to take some of the mental load off mom’s plate by consolidating the fragmented questions, care, and tracking.

Just as importantly, Fourth makes it easy to bring partners and other caregivers into the fold. That’s not only about relieving mom of physical and emotional labor. It’s about giving the people around her a real role, and helping them through their own similarly opaque season of identity searching.

Mental health is a through-line in all of this. Fourth today is not a therapist, but the aim is to surface concerns, even the ones that never trigger a full depression intervention. There was nothing more isolating to me than being handed questionnaire after questionnaire postpartum that identified me as “definitely not depressed” while living an experience I also knew wasn’t “right.”

Humans and health are not binary, and those of us caught in the middle can feel particularly unseen.

AI and software can’t solve all these problems. At best, they provide guidance, context, and navigation. So Fourth is equally committed to surfacing real-world mom and dad groups, communities, and classes, so we can come together and, at the very least, know we’re not alone.

These are early days, but this is a bit of the why. I’d love for you to follow along.