RADICAL REALIST

Béa Fertility

A modern take on an old clinical treatment

The Béa Fertility team poses with a shipment of kits

The fertility industry is booming. This might sound like good news, especially in countries facing population decline. But there’s a dark side to the phenomenon.

In the UK, fertility is one of the most heavily privatised health sectors. Because of taboos dating back to the first ‘test-tube babies’ of the 1970s (and the Catholic Church’s longtime disapproval of IVF and surrogacy), public funding has been rarely and timidly deployed in fertility innovation.

As a result, private capital has flowed through the sector. From 2019 to 2021, IVF treatments in the UK rose by 9%, while the number of treatments carried out by the NHS for 18-34s actually fell by 10%.

IVF is an expensive procedure, with one cycle costing up to £5,000 on average in the UK, not including the cost of additional medicines, consultations and tests. In the US, the average cost of one cycle is $12,000-$14,000, but depending on the patients’ needs, sometimes $30,000 or more. And women under 35 on average have just a 55% chance of conceiving on their first IVF cycle, a rate that falls drastically with just a few years of age. The expensive, repeated, and emotionally charged nature of IVF has made the procedure a cash cow for the industry.

But have lower-cost, less invasive interventions been ignored in the meantime?

Tess Cosad thinks so. Tess is the Founder of Béa Fertility, a start-up pioneering a modern take on an old clinical treatment. Intracervical insemination (ICI) is a procedure that places and holds semen directly against the cervix for up to one hour, increasing the chance of pregnancy. Béa has designed a medical device that performs ICI, allowing women to try to conceive at home without intercourse or hormone therapy.

Béa’s treatment kit comes with the ‘hardware,’ and guides to understanding menstrual cycles, semen sample health, and free coaching support. Three cycles of ICI from Béa are £599, making it significantly cheaper than IUI (intrauterine insemination, a similar procedure done in-clinic), which can range from £700-£1,600 for a single cycle and usually requires hormones. Béa’s kit can be used with a partner’s sperm or donor sperm alike. Béa’s first customers entered a clinical trial to test the device, which yielded an impressive 39.28% success rate over three cycles (IUI is generally 10-15% effective per cycle under the age of 35).

The Béa Fertility Kit

Tess started Béa after seeing countless friends struggle with fertility and feeling like the options available to them were inadequate. She met an embryologist, and together they embarked on a two-year, product-development journey involving over 90 design concepts and 20 speculum exams, with Tess testing the applicator on herself.

In 2021, Tess raised a pre-seed funding round, followed by a seed round in 2022 from a combination of angel investors and VCs. In her words, “Béa is a once in a lifetime thing,” and she found investors enthusiastic to tap into the $50 billion fertility market. Some of Béa’s angel investors have even gone through IVF themselves.

Currently, Béa is a team of six, each looking after their own department, including operations, marketing, and finance. In the future, Tess envisions expansion to the US and additional fertility products relating to hormone management, nutrition, lifestyle, and more. Béa is currently focusing on a direct-to-consumer approach in the UK, but ultimately wants to pass their tech and expertise onto providers, who can in turn reach patients at scale. Tess imagines Béa as a form of “primary care” in fertility, available to patients the moment they decide they want to conceive.

The most exciting thing for team Béa right now? Just a few weeks ago, Isabella was the first ‘Béaby’ born as a result of the Béa Treatment. According to Tess, “playing a small part in helping bring Isabella into this world is truly my proudest achievement – she is what we have been working towards these past years, and to see her arrive has made this journey so worth it.”

To learn more about Béa Fertility, click here.