Future Family Raises $10M To Help Families Bear The Cost Of IVF

For many women who may have less-than-ideal fertility hormone levels and who are struggling to get pregnant, or maybe don’t want to have kids for a few years, in-vitro fertilization and egg freezing are two important options. And while those procedures have become more mainstream in conversation over the past few years, it’s definitely not mainstream in price. Women and couples aiming to have a child through in vitro fertilization (IVF) can spend upwards of $20,000—assuming the first round works.

For the average American, that isn’t realistic.

To that end, San Francisco-based Future Family has raised a $10 million Series A to make that financial commitment easier to bear and to help women going through the process. The round was led by Aspect Ventures with participation from iNovia, BBG Ventures, Launch Capital, and others. The round brings the company’s total funding to $14.2 million.

Follow Crunchbase News on Twitter

Claire Tomkins, the CEO of Future Family, was inspired by her own fertility experience, which called for six rounds of IVF and committing more than $100,000 in out-of-pocket costs to conceive her baby.

“If you weren’t sitting in Silicon Valley with a tech job, and frankly even if you did, it was still very hard to afford,” Tomkins said.

To help close the gap in affordability, Future Family connects individuals who plan to undergo IVF or egg freezing to partner clinics. As part of the arrangement, Future Family pays for the cost of the service up-front. Customers then pay back the cost under a monthly plan.

However, Future Family thinks of itself as more than a company that hands outs loans for IVF. It also acts as a concierge for women going through an oft-convoluted process.

Alongside its financing subscriptions for both egg freezing and IVF, customers are connected with fertility nurses and practitioners through Future Family’s telehealth platform. Depending on a customer’s subscription tier, which ranges from $250 to $300 per month, Family Fund also offers access to lab works, genetic testing, and acupuncture.

Tomkins told Crunchbase News the concierge services fill an important information and support gap for women undergoing IVF.

“The biggest barriers to getting fertility services remain affordability followed, second, by the complexity of the self-managed healthcare journey,” Tomkins explained.

It’s a personal touch that Tomkins believes will fend off Lending Club, which has also shown interest in financing IVF.

“[Lending Club and CapexMD] offer traditional and incomplete solutions and [have] not scaled meaningfully in this market,” Tomkins explained. “So we’re coming from this perspective that there needs to be a holistic solution.”

When Future Family launched in 2017, it had 30 partner clinics. Over a year later, the startup claims connections with 250 fertility clinics across the country. Tomkins said the raise will be used to scale the business and add more clinics. The company also plans to hire more practitioners for its concierge service to alleviate its backlog of waitlisted customers.