An always-on care layer for the fertility and pregnancy journey - built by someone who spent three years lost inside it.
Four backs, one embrace, and a wordmark that doubles as a knot. The picture Conceive chose to represent itself is not a doctor or a device - it is people holding on to each other. That is the pitch, more or less.
Fertility treatment is one of the few things you can spend twenty thousand dollars on and still wait three weeks for someone to answer a two-line question. The clinics are good at procedures. They are less good at the part in between - the anxious Tuesday, the confusing lab result, the sense that you are supposed to somehow narrate your own medical journey. Conceive, a New York company founded in 2021, is a bet that this gap is the actual product.
The mechanism is deliberately unglamorous. A member pays a subscription - Conceive Plus starts at $43 a month, Premium at $116 - and in return gets a real person. Not a chatbot, but a nurse, a coach, or a dietitian, reachable by text around the clock, plus evidence-based education and a small cohort of eight to ten people going through roughly the same thing at roughly the same time. The company says its median response time is under eight minutes against a target of twenty.
That number is worth pausing on, because it is the whole thesis compressed. Most fertility startups sell a test - swab this, mail it back, receive a PDF. Conceive sells the follow-up to the test: the answer, the reassurance, the next step. It is a distinction between measuring appointments and measuring outcomes, and Conceive has firmly picked the second. It calls itself the first digital company focused on changing fertility outcomes, and it reports that 61% of members conceive within six months and that member anxiety drops by 80%.
You can be skeptical of any startup's self-reported metrics, and you should be. But the structure underneath them is sensible: give a scared person fast access to a competent human, wrap it in community, and the person both does better and stays subscribed. Conceive is selling that same care to two buyers at once - directly to consumers, and to fertility clinics as an integrated layer that it says produces roughly 5x ROI and gets patients into treatment about 40% faster. Empathy and margin, in this telling, are not opponents.
“The hardest part of fertility isn't always the treatment.”
Pick a lane. Both come with humans who answer.
Personalized fertility coaching, 24/7 text support from nurses, coaches and dietitians, expert-reviewed educational content, and referrals to fertility specialists when you need them.
Everything in Plus, plus monthly 1:1 video calls with healthcare professionals, virtual expert-led events, full community access, and member-only sessions.
Testing paired with evidence-based interpretation and a clear next step - so a result never leaves you guessing what to do about it.
Curated peer groups matched by journey stage and location. Small, specific, and relevant - the right eight strangers instead of a forum of eight thousand.
Before Conceive, Berson had the kind of resume that reads like a straight line - Citi, Google, Weight Watchers, where she led strategic growth and M&A, and a stint at Andreessen Horowitz as the firm was learning to invest in digital health. Then infertility rewrote the line.
Three years, multiple treatments, a missed diagnosis, and a miscarriage. Eventually, a daughter. What stayed with her was the isolation - the feeling that the system handled the medicine and left her alone with everything else. She built the company she wished had existed, describing it as an always-on connected care layer for fertility and pregnancy.
The values showed up early in the ownership. Conceive's founding cap table was majority female and 42% BIPOC, backed by the founders of Natalist, Tia, Forward, Cityblock, Pillpack and Dia&Co - a deliberate choice to have the company owned by people who resemble the people it serves.
The money
Investors: Kindred Ventures (lead), Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and 40+ founders & angels.
The milestones
Conceive is founded in New York by Lauren Berson.
Public beta launches alongside a $3.7M seed round led by Kindred Ventures.
Expands the clinic-partnership layer; reports 5x ROI and ~40% faster treatment starts.
Most recent reported fundraise, bringing total funding to roughly $4.93M.
Community cohorts are capped at 8-10 people, matched by both fertility stage and city.
Berson worked at a16z before founding a company in the space the firm was learning to fund.
The founding cap table was majority female and 42% BIPOC - unusual in venture-backed health tech.
Berson volunteers with JCCA, a New York child-services agency, work she leaned into during her own journey.
“I don't think I'd be pregnant without it. That's the truth.”
Conceive is a New York-based virtual fertility company that acts as an always-on care layer wrapped around the fertility and pregnancy journey. Founded in 2021 by Lauren Berson after her own three-year struggle with infertility, it pairs 24/7 nurse and coach support with cohort-based community and evidence-based education. Members reach a real person - a nurse, coach, or dietitian - in minutes rather than waiting weeks for a clinic callback, and the company sells both direct-to-consumer subscriptions and a B2B layer to fertility clinics.
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