Undergrads and recent grads—young, healthy, and debt burdened—are being offered five figures to donate their eggs to other women undergoing IVF. Cofertility has a more grown-up model.he best time to freeze your eggs is when you are young and can least afford to pay for it,” says Lauren Makler, founder and CEO of Cofertility, a Los Angeles startup with a novel model that addresses three weaknesses in the fertility business, which plays a part in about 100,000 of U.S. births a year.
Fascinated, Rockwell studied egg donation advertising for her senior thesis. For historical context, she looked at ads published in thefrom 1992 to 2015 . Her conclusion: There was then and is now a high demand for the eggs of Ivy League students and grads, with families willing to pay tens of thousands for them. “I am a tall, white, slim woman. Those things, unsurprisingly, are very, very requested for.
Instead, she accepted her sister’s offer to freeze some of her own eggs, in case Makler needed them. She ended up keeping her ovaries and not needing her sister’s eggs—indeed, Makler, now 36, spoke toover Zoom from her Los Angeles home, while on maternity leave following the birth of her second child. In 2021, after her first child was born, Makler recruited two cofounders and in 2022 raised $5 million in an initial seed round for Cofertility.
Laurie, now 28, began worrying about the prospective decline of her own fertility last year after realizing she probably wouldn’t be ready to have her own children until her early or mid 30s—she had just started a three year part-time master’s program and didn’t have a partner. She wanted to freeze some of her eggs, “but it absolutely wasn’t possible to pay for it myself,’’ says Laurie, who asked that her last name and city not be used.
Both Kahn and Tober say that studies of women who have undergone complete IVF cycles can’t be entirely applied to egg donors because the women who have been studied are usually older, less responsive to hormones, already struggling to conceive naturally and go through both egg harvesting and implantation. Donors are young with, presumably, years of fertility remaining, and are chosen specifically for their high fertility.