Boston-based fertility clinic Legacy has announced it raised $10M in Series A fundraising led by FirstMark Capital.
As part of the funding round, Rick Heitzmann, founder and partner at FirstMark Capital, an early-stage, New York City-based venture capital firm that's focused on healthcare, will join the Legacy board.
Legacy's model is to provide an easy and convenient way to deposit, freeze and store sperm. Once a client enrolls, Legacy sends them a discreet package with instructions on how to make a deposit. The company then arranges for overnight shipping to a clinic where sperm is tested and analyzed for viability, then shipped off to a cryostorage facility.
“Legacy is taking a patient-first perspective on the large growing and changing fertility market. Putting the patient first and building trust is a key part of any relationship and it is especially important in healthcare,” said Heitzmann.
The new funding marks over $15 million in funds raised from a top-tier group of investors that also includes Bain Capital Ventures, Section 32, Y Combinator, TQ Ventures and Tribe Capital. In 2020, Legacy received $3.5M in funding.
Legacy, which now has 20 employees, has seen a boost in business from the pandemic, which allows the company to hire remotely for its growth team, product team and engineering team.
“We’ve been growing more than 25% per month for over a year now. Part of that was greatly due to the pandemic and because of that we can expect to hire 5-10 more folks within the next few months,” CEO Khaled Kteily said. He said Legacy was one of the first startups to focus on fertility through human sperm cryobanking.
Unlike its competitors, Legacy is a non-gendered sperm clinic that aims to appeal to transgender individuals looking to preserve their sperm.
Another differentiator for Legacy in comparison to traditional clinics is that it offers telehealth appointments, supplements and even DNA fragmentation testing. which Kteily says is “a very rare form of testing only found in 50 clinics across the U.S. We’re the first to do so via mail-in."
Legacy was incubated at Harvard and although they are working to expand across the U.S., they hope to continue to be based in Boston.
“There are very few cities if any outside of Boston where you could have done what we did. The level of access we had, particularly across the Harvard ecosystem, allowed us to build our initial team,” which carries the success of the company today Kteily said.
