Carrot, which helps companies offer their employees comprehensive fertility benefits, raised $11.5 million in Series A funding. CRV led the round, with participation from Sound Ventures, Y Combinator, and Uncork Capital.
"It became a problem I couldn't let go of," Sun tells Business Insider."I wasn't sure what I was going to build. I wasn't sure I would even start a company, but I was obsessed with this problem. My friends, my sister, my family, I could see them in different permutations struggling with fertility in their own ways. That's how it all started."
"[Tammy] is incredibly passionate about [fertility benefits] based on her own experience going through and freezing her own eggs. She has both industry understanding and empathy coupled with her business acumen. She is signing up customer after customer so she's found product-market fit, but her vision and personal experience drew me in initially," said Christianson.
"I literally Googled a fertility clinic in San Francisco and went to the first one that showed up," said Sun."Ultimately it wasn't the right one for me and I went to a different clinic, but I felt the entire system was set up for a very narrow subset of people from the moment I walked in." "There are lots of pain points. Access to education is a problem that I personally felt, access to support and care navigation that I personally felt. But the first and most important problem, the one that is transformational to fertility care overall, is the access problem related to affordability. Bottom line is that not enough people who seek fertility care cannot afford it financially," said Sun.
"Google and Facebook introduced this idea 5 years ago and sent a signal into the economy that [fertility benefits] were emerging [as a priority]. The science and technology on the science side has gotten so much better, so it's a combination of a lot of things hitting the mainstream at the same time really," said Sun."It's progress. It's scientific and social progress.