Afton Vechery, formerly of 23AndMe, and Carly Leahy, former executive at Uber, want to make women’s reproductive data accessible, affordable and simpler to comprehend.
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Their new venture Modern Fertility, which launched Wednesday, is the first comprehensive at-home fertility test focused on giving women the most accurate data about their reproductive timeline.
Its main target is young women who want a family someday, but not necessarily anytime soon, a trend that has increased among young women over the past few decades.
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In fact, according to the Census, in 1976, 68 percent of 29-year-old women had a child. In 2016, only 40 percent did.
And between 2006 and 2010, 7.4 million women (11.9 percent) said they received infertility services, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Survey of Family Growth.
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Credit: Modern Fertility
Credit: Modern Fertility
"As we get older, fertility becomes a giant egg-shaped question mark. One second we're preventing pregnancy and the next second, we're panicking. It's an abrupt shift and there's virtually no information in between," the Modern Fertility co-founders wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
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And the doctors they consulted in their research said women usually wait too long to freeze their eggs.
Both women view this lack of information and of accessibility as a public health issue, Vechery told Forbes.
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“Every woman should have this information,” she said.
The new at-home kit features the same laboratory tests available at fertility clinics, but at a better price.
According to TechCrunch, comparable kits are priced at more than double Modern Fertility's pre-order price of $149. For example Everlywell kits come out to about $400.
But competitor Future Family is selling a limited number of kits for the same price as Modern Fertility ($149) will increase that price to $300, a spokesperson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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How it works
The at-home tests measure 10 different hormones (listed below) that show you how many eggs you have, your ovulation schedule and other fertility-related body functions.
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Hormones measured
- Anti-mullerian hormone (AMH)
- Follicle stimulating hormone (FSH)
- Estradiol (E2)
- Luteinizing hormone (LH)
- Thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH)
- Free thyroxine (FT4)
- Progesterone (P4)
- Prolactin (PRL)
- Free Testosterone (Free T)
- Total Testosterone (T)
Women in the U.S. can pre-order Modern Fertility tests now on the official website to be delivered later in the year.
The future mom will receive physician-reviewed medical results as well as a fertility score, which offers easy-to-understand information about what your hormone levels mean and what you can do about them.
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If you don’t want to wait for your tests to ship, you can also go to a local lab.
Prices are expected to go up after the pre-order period, which doesn’t currently have an end date.
Read the full blog post at Medium.com.
This story has been updated to reflect a correction in price of Future Family kits. A previous version incorrectly cited kits priced at $600.
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