This fertility start-up aims to make every step of the egg-freezing process easier

Just two years after selling her public-relations firm Bevel for $75 million, founder Jessica Schaefer is back — bringing her branding skills to a completely new business: a wellness company for women with a focus on fertility.Lushi connect users with concierge doctors and nurses to help with egg freezing and IVF.“No one’s done it … the venture capitalists kept saying, ‘We’ve never seen this before,’” Schaefer, 38, explained of the company’s commitment to handling every step of a women’s fertility journey — from monitoring hormones to handling bloodwork to education on the entire process.“There are so many B2B payments companies and AI startups but this is actually a real need.”Fertility is already a $30 billion industry and expected to balloon over the next few years, according to Grand View Research.Celebrities like Chrissy Teigen, Emma Roberts and Kourtney Kardashian have shared their fertility stories in recent years, and TikTok and Instagram videos of women getting real about their reproductive health have gotten millions of views. Schaefer, who ran communications for Steve Cohen at Point 72 before leaving to start her own firm, came to this from a personal angle.When she decided, at age 35, to freeze her own eggs, she assumed the process would be straightforward — especially given the tens of thousands of dollars she was paying out of pocket.But when she prematurely injected one hormone, it meant having to re-do the entire process — another month of treatment, hormones and recovery, as well as the massive bill that accompanied it.One egg-freezing session can cost upwards of $25,000 (as can a round of IVF) and require self-administering up to 42 injections over the span of several weeks before egg retrieval at a clinic.“It’s very complicated,” Schaefer said.

“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.”...