Gaia Raises $20M Series A to Make IVF Financially Accessible Through Predictive Insurance
January 28, 2025
Gaia, the London-based fertility technology company, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Atomico, bringing total funding to $23 million. Existing investors Kindred Capital, Seedcamp, and US-based Clocktower Technology Ventures also participated. The round was announced on Valentine's Day 2022, the same day Gaia debuted its personalised IVF insurance product on the Lloyd's of London insurance market, where it operates as a coverholder of global insurer Beazley. Atomico partner Sasha Astafyeva joined the Gaia board as part of the investment.
Gaia was founded in 2019 by Nader AlSalim, following a personal experience that proved formative: he and his wife underwent five rounds of IVF across three different clinics in two countries, spending around $68,000 in the process before having a child. Struck by the financial opacity, emotional toll, and inequitable access that characterised the IVF sector, AlSalim built Gaia to give prospective parents greater financial clarity and predictability over their treatment journeys.
The company's core product is a personalised insurance and payment model for IVF. Gaia uses a dataset drawn from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and private clinics — encompassing more than a million IVF records from approximately 500,000 women dating back to 1991 — to predict how many rounds of treatment a given patient is likely to need and to model the expected cost. Patients who do not achieve a live birth within the rounds that Gaia's model predicts pay a substantially reduced fee. Those who do have a child pay back the cost of their full treatment in monthly instalments. In parallel, Gaia also helps match patients with appropriate clinics based on their specific clinical profile.
The fertility care market faces a structural access problem. Only around one in seven couples in the UK and US who require IVF are able to access it, primarily due to cost — a single IVF cycle in the US typically runs between $15,000 and $25,000. Three in four people who seek fertility treatment never begin because the anticipated financial burden feels prohibitive. Meanwhile, demand for assisted reproduction is rising globally, driven by delayed family formation, declining male fertility, and growing awareness of egg freezing and other interventions.
The $20 million raise will fund Gaia's expansion of operations in the UK and its entry into the United States, where the absence of widespread insurance coverage for IVF creates a particularly large addressable market. Gaia will also invest in growing its clinical partnerships, expanding its data models, and developing its end-to-end patient experience platform.
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