We were lucky to catch up with Lauren Makler recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lauren, thanks for joining us today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.

In 2017, I was in the midst of launching Uber Health at Uber, and felt a pain in my side that wouldn’t go away. After pushing doctors for testing, I underwent a diagnostic surgery that revealed an incredibly rare abdominal disease and was told I may lose my ovaries.

As you can imagine, my first questions were: how do I navigate this disease? But also, how will I build a family some day? Because so little is known about this disease, it was unclear if I could pursue egg-freezing, so I started looking into donation. What stuck out was how antiquated and, for a lack of a better word, “icky” the traditional system felt. Turns out I wasn’t alone. In fact, one recent Harvard study found that 62.2% of donor-conceived adults think the exchange of money for donor gametes is wrong, and 40.6% are “disturbed” by the fact that money was exchanged around their conception.

As I got deeper into the process, I saw more symptoms of this broken system unfolding, including the real lack of ethnic diversity among donors, which leaves intended parents without adequate options for growing a family that reflects their background, and how the promise of anonymity plastered across sites was increasingly misleading and unrealistic in our hyperconnected world with ubiquitous genetic testing. The entire experience felt like a disservice and I couldn’t shake the feeling: Don’t people going through this (growing) family-building path deserve better?

Making a long story a bit shorter, ultimately, I was very fortunate to have my sister freeze her eggs and donate them to me to potentially use later, and then with the support of many doctors and multiple surgeries, I overcame my disease and was able to conceive my beautiful daughter without using my sister’s eggs, but my experience gave me absolute clarity that I had to build a company in reproductive health. I knew that there was only one way I wanted to spend my time working going forward.

That’s why, inspired by my own personal journey and that of my co-founders, in 2022, we launched Cofertility, a fertility ecosystem that is reshaping fertility preservation and third-party reproduction so it’s more accessible, human and community-driven.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

At Cofertility, we’re in the “family” business, determined to improve the family-building journey — today or in the future — and are in an endless pursuit to make these experiences more positive. At its core, we give women the opportunity to freeze their eggs for *free* when they donate half of the retrieved eggs to a family who can’t otherwise conceive – like couples with infertility, gay dads, cancer survivors, and more. Our approach brings together egg-freezing and egg donation at scale, while radically restructuring the cost of egg-freezing along the way to address accessibility issues.

Our Freeze by Co platform enables women to more accessibly pursue egg freezing through two programs: with our Split program, those who qualify can freeze and store their eggs for free when they give half of the eggs retrieved to a family who can’t otherwise conceive and those in our Keep program can freeze their eggs and store them all for their own later use, while taking advantage of discounts throughout the process to lighten the financial load. All members also get access to our online community, where people talk openly about their egg-freezing experience and support one another through it in real time.

Our Family by Co platform is our human-centered approach for matching intended parents with egg donors in our Split program. Matches are made in a personal, empathic way including educational resources, support tools, and a community of other intended parents. The intended parents in our Family by Co program have shared that they feel a sense of purpose that they can play a role in helping someone preserve their future fertility in a very accessible format, in contrast to the more transactional nature of cash compensation for egg-donation.

Our goal is to address the key tension points in fertility care: the exclusionary cost of egg freezing, the exploitative and transactional nature of cash compensation in egg donation, and the lack of socioeconomic diversity amongst egg donors that prohibits intended parents from building the families they want. Together, the programs create a new kind of human-centered ecosystem for fertility care and third party reproduction.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your firm or practice?

Before we started fundraising, we did a survey testing our thesis and were incredibly encouraged by the response. This gave us the conviction needed as we received so much positive feedback. We found that women who are open to egg sharing are motivated by their passion for reproductive health, desire to help a family grow and bought into the cause of a more human, empathic system. They are much more motivated by the problem and opportunity than money. And every time I met with someone who struggled with fertility in the past and shared his/her story, I was even more convinced that what we were doing had the potential to provide such needed change in the industry with that momentum we began taking meetings and we’re fortunate to have some of the most thoughtful, respected investors and healthcare thinkers on our side. Our seed funding was led by Initialized Capital and Offline Ventures, with participation from Coalition Partners, Muse Capital, Arkitekt Ventures, and the Co-founders and CEOs of Figs, Hello Sunshine, Mented Cosmetics and more. These strategic partners and operators believed (and continue to believe) deeply in the need for a new community-driven ecosystem to exist

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I’m a big believer in the power of manifestation. Every morning while my zoom loads for the first call of the day, I pull a card from Gabby Bernstein’s Super Attractor deck. That book changed the trajectory of my life, so a little reminder each morning sets the stage for my day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cofertility.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cofertility/ + https://www.instagram.com/freezebyco/ + https://www.instagram.com/familybyco/ + https://www.instagram.com/laurenmakler/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cofertility/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cofertility/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/cofertility