Mate Fertility Raises $2.8M to Launch Fertility Clinics Across the U.S.

On Feb 9, 2021, Built-In LA reported, Fertility services are prohibitively expensive for so many Americans, but a lot of that has to do with simple supply and demand.

There are 480 fertility clinics in all of the U.S., 80 percent of which are concentrated in just five markets. This means that individuals living outside those markets often have to travel long distances to access these services.

The difficulty of accessing fertility services is something Oliver Bogner learned firsthand. Bogner’s significant other discovered she was a carrier of the BRCA1 gene, a genetic variation that has a strong correlation with breast and ovarian cancer. For that reason, she wanted to pursue in vitro fertilization (IVF) because it would allow the couple to screen embryos for the gene. But the cost and accessibility of egg freezing services created a major roadblock for the couple.

Meanwhile, Bogner’s younger brother Gabriel Bogner leaned towards using IVF. Gabriel, an IVF baby himself, knew he was gay from an early age, and also knew that he wanted to start a family. Plenty of people in the LGBTQ+ community want to have their own kids, but many of them rely on fertility services to make this a reality, which means they run into the same roadblocks that the elder Bogner and his partner faced.

This is what led the two brothers to start Mate Fertility, a startup geared toward making fertility services more accessible and more affordable.

You can read the full article here.