Sunfish.
The company that decided fertility should be priced by whether you get a baby - not by how many appointments you survive.
// A fish that lays 200 million eggs lent its name to a startup trying to fund just one.
The company that decided fertility should be priced by whether you get a baby - not by how many appointments you survive.
// A fish that lays 200 million eggs lent its name to a startup trying to fund just one.
Somewhere in America today, a couple sits in a fertility clinic waiting room and does the math one more time. The treatment they need might cost $15,000. It might cost $25,000. It might work on the first try, or the third, or not at all. For most of the last decade, that uncertainty was the product. You paid for procedures and prayed for outcomes.
Sunfish looked at that waiting room and asked an awkward question: what if you only really wanted the baby, and everything else was just the bill? Today the Los Angeles company sits between patients, clinics, and lenders - handing out flat-fee bundles, predicting cycle costs with an algorithm, and, in a move the rest of healthcare still finds startling, offering some of your money back if it doesn't work.
Three words describe most IVF journeys, and none of them are "predictable." A single cycle in the US averages $15,000 to $25,000, success rates hover between 25% and 40%, and insurance - when it exists at all - reads like a riddle. People drain 401(k)s. They sell engagement rings. They take on debt for a chance, not a guarantee.
The cruelty was the opacity. You could not know what you would pay, and you could not know what you would get. Sunfish's founders saw a market that had quietly normalized selling hope by the procedure.
In 2016, Angela Rastegar set out to freeze her eggs. She had just started a company, had no fertility coverage, and found the whole thing confusing, expensive, and lonely. She paid out of pocket and figured it out alone. A few years later she joined one of the country's largest fertility companies and watched the same scene play out for everyone else. Then, in 2024, she went through IVF herself - including cycles that did not work.
Rastegar is not a tourist in this problem. She holds a BA in Human Biology and an MBA from Stanford, founded and exited two companies, and spent time as a venture investor at Village Capital backing early health tech and fintech. The bet she made with Sunfish was almost contrarian: that fertility's real bottleneck was not medicine but money and information - and that both could be engineered.
"There's bipartisan support for covering family building."
- Angela Rastegar, Co-Founder & CEOIt is a tidy irony that the company most focused on certainty was born from one founder's repeated encounters with the opposite. Sunfish exists because its CEO kept getting handed the bill no one could explain.
Sunfish does not run a clinic. It runs the financial and emotional layer around one - the part everyone else treated as paperwork.
A Financial Hub and marketplace of fertility loan options that has supported over $200M in applications across all 50 states.
Flat-fee, all-inclusive bundles with unlimited embryo transfers and a partial money-back guarantee if it doesn't work.
An algorithm reads your biodata to predict the optimal eggs to freeze and the cost - backed by a cost guarantee.
Discounts on medications, storage and mental health services, plus a dedicated human planning partner.
The clever bit is the guarantee. By promising money back when treatment fails or when its own cost prediction misses, Sunfish puts its revenue where its prediction is. The algorithm has to be honest, because the company pays when it lies.
A guarantee is a marketing line until the data backs it. Sunfish's does. Patients in its programs report a 70.8% embryo transfer success rate against a 54.3% national average - the kind of gap that turns a pitch into a position.
The traction is just as concrete: more than $200 million in loan applications supported, savings of up to $9,000 per cycle, a footprint across all 50 states and 70-plus clinics, and a partnership with Ivy Fertility that grew from one of the first clinics to all 28 locations. The money agrees too - a $10M Series A in January 2025 led by Haymaker Ventures, with Allegis Capital, Coyote Ventures, Fiat Ventures and others along for the ride.
"The care, the reminders, the financial protection - it all made such a difference. Sunfish was a source of calm and comfort during one of the most emotional times of our lives."
- Cher & James, Sunfish patientsThe mission is one line: building a family should be achievable without crushing financial burden. The "all" is doing real work there - Sunfish builds for single parents and LGBTQIA+ families, for the uninsured and the partially covered, for surrogacy and donor journeys, not just the textbook case.
The name is not an accident either. The ocean sunfish is among the most fertile creatures alive, releasing up to 200 million eggs at a time, and it drifts through the currents with an unbothered calm. A company about fertility and financial anxiety could do worse for a mascot.
Fertility care keeps getting better at the medicine and no better at the money. As demand rises and coverage stays patchy, someone has to own the part where patients figure out what they'll pay and what they'll get. Sunfish is betting that layer is a business - one that's portable to Mexico, to partial-coverage patients, to whatever family-building looks like next.
Competitors exist - Future Family, Gaia, Carrot, Progyny, Maven - but few combine the loan marketplace, the outcome-based guarantee, and a prediction engine in one membership. The skeptic's question is fair: can a guarantee survive at scale? The answer will be written in the success rates.
That is the whole bet. Not certainty about the outcome - no one can sell that - but certainty about the price of trying. Sunfish didn't cure the uncertainty in the waiting room. It just stopped charging people for it.