Simply two years after promoting her public-relations agency Bevel for $75 million, founder Jessica Schaefer is again — bringing her branding abilities to a very new enterprise: a wellness firm for ladies with a deal with fertility.
Lushi join customers with concierge medical doctors and nurses to assist with egg freezing and IVF.
“No one’s done it … the venture capitalists kept saying, ‘We’ve never seen this before,’” Schaefer, 38, defined of the corporate’s dedication to dealing with each step of a ladies’s fertility journey — from monitoring hormones to dealing with bloodwork to training on your entire course of.
“There are so many B2B payments companies and AI startups but this is actually a real need.”
Fertility is already a $30 billion trade and anticipated to balloon over the following few years, in line with Grand View Analysis.
Celebrities like Chrissy Teigen, Emma Roberts and Kourtney Kardashian have shared their fertility tales lately, and TikTok and Instagram movies of ladies getting actual about their reproductive well being have gotten thousands and thousands of views.
Schaefer, who ran communications for Steve Cohen at Level 72 earlier than leaving to start out her personal agency, got here to this from a private angle. When she determined, at age 35, to freeze her personal eggs, she assumed the method could be simple — particularly given the tens of 1000’s of {dollars} she was paying out of pocket.
However when she prematurely injected one hormone, it meant having to re-do your entire course of — one other month of therapy, hormones and restoration, in addition to the huge invoice that accompanied it.
One egg-freezing session can value upwards of $25,000 (as can a spherical of IVF) and require self-administering as much as 42 injections over the span of a number of weeks earlier than egg retrieval at a clinic.
“It’s very complicated,” Schaefer mentioned. “You wouldn’t go get Botox, take the syringes home and do it yourself, right? So I don’t understand why we’ve been treating women’s bodies any differently.”
Lushi — named after a uncommon breed of hen — arranges your entire therapy course of, together with at-home injections by nurses (“It’s like Uber for nurses,” Schaefer mentioned), 24/7 AI help, on-call medical doctors and customised wellness plans to optimize fertility. The platform additionally manages the egg-collection course of at a clinic.
All in, a affected person can count on to spend round $18,000. Schaefer notes that one spherical accomplished the precise manner is cheaper than a number of rounds attributable to mis-steps or errors.
“For the longest time, fertility companies have been created by doctors — not by marketers, brand builders and people who have access to this network of engineering talent,” Schaefer mentioned.
To retain majority possession and management of Lushi, she rejected a $5 million non-public fairness funding from an undisclosed agency in favor of smaller seed funding checks from a handful of serial entrepreneurs together with Ariel Kaye, founder and CEO of Parachute, and Justin Dibbs, co-founder of Allied Gold Corp .
Her community has additionally led to conversations with Mark Cuban, an early investor in Value Plus Medicine, about doable partnerships that would decrease the costs of fertility medicine.
Schaefer and her co-founder, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Mana Baskovic, plan to broaden into “all areas of women’s health,” together with pre- and post-menopause care. They’re launching Lushi medical facilities and occasion collection in New York and Los Angeles.
Past creating the expertise she wished for herself, Schaefer can be bringing her personal sensibility to the creation of the corporate, the app and the model.
She tapped a longtime New Yorker artist Adam Douglas Thompson to create sketches for the model and has rolled out well timed, playful advert campaigns — like a current Soho advert purchase tying the surging worth of hen eggs to fertility prices.
As President Trump has expressed help for mandating insurance coverage protection of IVF, Schaefer is hoping he’ll push it even additional.
“We’re working with the new administration,” Schaefer says. “President Trump has been a champion of fertility. We’d like him to take it one step further and include egg freezing, which is currently considered elective.” Lushi is presently offering feedback to the White Home on a doable IVF Govt Order.
She even has her eye on a possible Trump group ally.
“I would love Elon to invest,” Schaefer mentioned of the pro-natalist billionaire. “We’re working on it.”
