Just two years after selling the $75 million public company Bevel, founder Jessica Schaefer has returned. Bring her branding skills to a completely new business.
Lushi connects users with concierge doctors and nurses to help with egg freeze and IVF.
“No one did that… The venture capitalist kept saying, 'We've never seen this,'” Schaefer, 38, explained the company's commitment to handling every step of a woman's fertility journey, from hormone monitoring to education, from hormone monitoring to education.
“There are so many B2B payment companies and AI startups, but this is actually really necessary.”
Fertility is already a $30 billion industry and is expected to expand over the next few years, according to Grand View Research.
Celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and Emma Roberts Shared by Kourtney Kardashian Their fertility stories in recent years and authenticity about reproductive health, Tiktok and Instagram videos have gained millions of perspectives.
Schafer, who ran Steve Cohen's communications at point 72 before departing to start her own company, came to this from a personal angle. When she decided to freeze her eggs, she assumed the process would be easier – especially considering the tens of thousands of dollars she was paying out of her pocket.
But when she injected one hormone early, it meant she had to redo the whole process: another month's treatment, hormones, recovery and the massive bill that goes along with it.
A single egg-free session costs over $25,000 (to allow for rounds of IVF), and requires self-management of up to 42 injections a few weeks before an egg search in the clinic.
“It's very complicated,” Schafer said. “Is it true that you get Botox or take the syringe home and do it yourself?
Named after a lush variety of chickens – arranges the entire treatment process, including nurses' home injections (“it's like Uber for nurses”” and optimizes 24/7 AI support, on-call doctors and customized wellness plans. The platform also manages the egg collection process at the clinic.
All of this can be expected to spend around $18,000. Schaefer points out that one round made the right way is cheaper than multiple rounds caused by missteps and mistakes.
“For a long time, fertility companies have been created by doctors, not by marketers, brand builders, people who have access to this engineering talent network,” Schaefer said.
To maintain greener majority ownership and control, she rejected $5 million private equity investments from undisclosed companies in favor of a small number of seed funding checks from a handful of seed entrepreneurs, including Parachute founder and CEO Ariel Kay and Justin Dibbs, co-founder of Arido Gold Corp.
Her network also led to conversations with early drug investor Mark Cuban about a partnership that could lower the price of fertile drugs.
Schafer and her co-founder, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Mana Vaskovich, will expand to “all areas of women's health,” including premenopausal and postmenopausal care. They are launching green medical centers and events series in New York and Los Angeles.
Schafer not only creates the experience she wanted for herself, but also brings her own sensibility to creating companies, apps and brands.
She tapped longtime New Yorker artist Adam Douglas Thompson to create a sketch of the brand, and launched a timely and playful advertising campaign, like the recent SoHo ads that tied the burgeoning prices of chicken eggs to fertile costs.
As President Trump has expressed support for mandating IVF insurance coverage, Schafer hopes to push that further.
“We're working with the new administration,” Schafer says. “President Trump was a fertility advocate. We want him to take it a step further and include freezing eggs, which are now considered selective.” Lushi is currently offering a comment to the White House on the possible IVF executive order.
She also looks at potential allysers of the Trump team.
“I want to invest in Elon,” Schafer said of the pronatalist billionaire. “We're working on that.”
