Future Family secures $10M in the IVF market
Fertility is a huge market, expected worldwide to be worth over $30 billion by 2023, and Future Family, a new fertility startup is making headway into this sector. There are 85,000 women per year in the US alone who undergo In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment, at a cost of between $15,000-$17,000 per year. IVF is a particularly temperamental field of medicine generally with fewer than 50% of cycles resulting in a live birth. Despite these low odds of success and astronomical costs, many people continue to pay for IVF privately.
In the UK, IVF treatment in the NHS works on a postcode lottery with many areas not offering fertility treatments until patients have tried to conceive naturally for several years, and even then, the funding is often limited to only one of two cycles and only allows you to keep frozen embryos for a fixed number of years. As a result of this, many patients choose to go through the treatment privately, or through the insurance of their companies. Technology companies are far ahead of traditional companies in the fertility game, offering their female employees fertility services as a part of their perks package. Cynically this could be a move to allow female employees to freeze their eggs and delay motherhood, in order for these tech companies to get more from their employees, but ultimately it does increase their employees’ options. Apple and Facebook both pay up to $20,000 for egg freezing, which allows women to freeze up to about 20 eggs which can be used in IVF at a later date.
Future Family, is a new startup which helps in the financing of fertility treatment, offering packages ranging from $195-250 per month. Their variably priced packages allow couples to choose how much support they want and to include medication depending on the type of fertility procedure required. Over the 60 month term, this comes to between $11,700 to $15,000 which actually comes to about the same price as traditional IVF, simply spread out over 5 years, offering more flexible funding. Future family has just raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by Aspect Ventures, which CEO Claire Tomkins has said will go to expanding their monthly subscription offerings.
