Meet Mate Fertility
Inflect Portfolio Company Making the Path to Parenthood Easy, Comfortable, and Straightforward
Inflect Health is very proud to be an investor in Mate Fertility, a startup devoted to making parenthood far more affordable and accessible.
Mate was founded in early 2020 with a vision to build a better fertility system that focuses on the patient’s experience, as well as address the massive supply issues within the industry.
As our colleagues in Vituity have seen from painful experience in their clinical practice, infertility is a much greater problem than is typically acknowledged. According to the CDC, among heterosexual women aged 15 to 49 years with no prior births, about 1 in 5 (19%) are unable to get pregnant after one year of trying (infertility). Furthermore, about 1 in 4 (26%) women in this group have difficulty carrying a pregnancy to term (impaired fecundity).
Reproductive trends have also been declining worldwide for nearly 60 years. In the United States alone, 30% of the population requires some sort of fertility intervention — though only 2% actually receive fertility care.
Even for those who do seek out fertility services, the path isn’t so easy, as “fertility deserts” — areas where access to providers is little or nonexistent — are a nationwide issue. Even on the chance that hopeful parents-to-be are fortunate enough to have access to one of only 440 In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinics in the entire United States, most of which are located in large metropolitan cities — where an average cost of an IVF cycle routinely exceeds $20,000.
Comprised of fertility doctors and industry experts, Mate Fertility is the only company in the US actually addressing these root issues in the fertility industry — affordability, accessibility, and quality care.
Beginning with accessibility, the company is increasing the number of clinics and providers nationwide. Without enough clinics and doctors to provide care, the process doesn’t have a chance to begin.
And Mate Fertility is already returning strong results: Their 50% clinical pregnancy success rate surpasses the national average.
What’s more, the company hopes to open hundreds of clinics across the United States, and eventually bring down the cost of IVF nationwide — for the entire industry.
Then there’s affordability, and Mate Fertility isn’t skipping a beat: as the company scales, it plans to lobby for more insurance coverage and bring services in-house to reduce patient costs. By partnering with OBGYNs in traditionally underserved markets, Mate Fertility enables these doctors to offer IVF at a more affordable price point.
Last but not least, there’s quality care, and Mate’s team of talented Reproductive Endocrinology Fertility Specialists (REIs) — currently a crew of five people — is a point of company pride, overseeing physicians to ensure quality control. Mate Fertility’s MSO model allows them to provide turnkey fertility solutions for its partners by offering embryology labs, training and upskilling, retrofitting, providing software access, remote IVF nursing services, patient acquisition, tele-fertility services and even more, under one platform.
This is only the beginning for Mate. The startup is launching at-home ovarian reserve kits and at-home sperm kits within the next few weeks, and wants everyone to know that more affordable IVF services are coming their way.
The company is also already eying secondary and tertiary markets like Alaska, Wyoming, West Virginia, Kansas, and Kentucky etc. in order to save patients from having to travel long hours by car or plane for access to high quality fertility care. Mate’s next locations will be in Central Coast of CA, , Northern Virginia, Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Pittsburgh.
We’re confident Mate’s efforts will lead to benefits for the entire industry — and to hopeful families across the country.
To learn more about Mate Fertility and their efforts to solve these critical infertility issues, visit their website.
