SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Stork Club, the company on a mission to modernize healthcare and give people the freedom to build a family on their own terms, announced it raised $30M in Series A funding led by General Catalyst, with Hemant Taneja joining the board. Existing investors Bowery Capital, Slow Ventures and angels Jack Altman, founder of Lattice; Zach Sims, founder of Codecademy; Oleg Rogynskyy, founder of People.ai; and Kevin Mahaffey, founder of Lookout also joined the round. Stork Club is also announcing several new customers from a variety of industries, including Ropes & Gray, Crescent Capital, Corgan, Fors Marsh Group and Inception.
Stork Club is the first to extend traditional employee benefits to include historically overlooked, yet critical components of maternal health: diagnostics, egg and sperm freezing, IVF, surrogacy, adoption, pregnancy guidance and postpartum recovery support. By consolidating care into one concierge-like experience — from preconception through pregnancy or adoption to postpartum and newborn care — employees have better health outcomes while employers have drastically reduced healthcare costs. For a company with a few thousand employees, Stork Club can save up to $3 million per year.
“Modern families include working women, older couples and LGBTQ+ couples looking to have children. It’s no longer a heterosexual couple having children in their 20s, yet the traditional healthcare model does not support these types of families,” said Jeni Mayorskaya, founder and CEO of Stork Club. “It’s time our healthcare model caught up to the times and provides services to all types of people. By rethinking healthcare from the ground up, we have an opportunity to make it a win-win for both people and organizations, providing better care resulting in better outcomes for people, and saving businesses millions on healthcare related costs.”
Platform Empowers Companies to Support Modern Families While Lowering Costs
Stork Club’s funding comes at a time when businesses are rethinking how they will attract and retain new talent as the pandemic ends. Businesses are also evaluating how to build and grow businesses with diversity, equity and inclusion as top priorities. The current health crisis proves the healthcare system is failing women and people of color, despite a constant rise in the expense. The legacy model does not promote gender equity, LGBTQ+ families or include support beyond pregnancy care, and cost businesses millions. For a business, health insurance is the second largest expense for an organization, costing over $1 trillion per year and growing. Within insurance, maternity care is the largest expense, which costs companies $130 billion a year.
“Stork Club has proven themselves as a true partner and the only provider we came across that offered seamless integration with our existing medical plan, making it extremely easy for our Benefits team and plan members to use,” said Julie Blume, Director of Total Rewards at Ropes & Gray. “Our plan members like that it gives them quick transparency into the treatment and pharmacy costs while taking away the burden of managing insurance authorizations.”
Stork Club Delivers New Level of Support and Transparency
Stork Club designed a radically different way for people to build a family on their own terms by removing the ambiguity, hassle, expense and stress associated with fertility and maternity care. Employees can use Stork Club to immediately view medical providers in their network and what their options are. They can also see exactly what their out-of-pocket costs will be before making any decisions, removing all of the guesswork about what is and what is not covered. Additionally, the service gets rid of the long wait for insurance authorization; members know instantly what is and isn’t covered.
Stork Club is able to do this because, unlike other perks or apps, its platform directly integrates with large health plan administrators, such as UnitedHealthcare and Aetna, promising a seamless experience for employers while simultaneously giving employees the transparency they need to make decisions about family building. Stork Club also developed its proprietary vetting process to identify high-performance doctors, clinics and labs — and established single-price care bundles, incentivizing people to use the best-performing care vs. optimizing for cost. Stork Club Members can request an appointment at a top clinic in the U.S. via a single click online, knowing their financial responsibility before even using their coverage.
Stork Club also uniquely provides members with a Care Navigator who can guide them through often complicated processes, as well as answer fertility, maternity care and insurance-related questions.
“The Stork Club team and Jeni have built a unique model that aims to rethink the family planning process end-to-end and make it more accessible and more affordable to a whole new group of people. We love how they have figured out how to create a transformative and comprehensive end-user experience with greater transparency — but also integrate seamlessly into the existing provider systems,” said Hemant Taneja, managing partner at General Catalyst. “We're excited to be part of a company that's helping to build the next generation of healthy families.”
How Stork Club Works
Employers add Stork Club to their health plan to fill out gaps in their fertility and maternity care to support their people at every stage of their family-building journey. Covered employees and their dependents access Stork Club web and mobile apps to get recommendations and care relevant to their current family goals: whether they plan to have a child later, now, are already expecting or returning back to work.
Stork Club partners with top medical providers across the U.S. directly and incentivizes them for better outcomes through direct contracting. Stork Club users have access to vetted certified telehealth experts on demand, as well as transparent payments integrated with their existing health plan.
While the pandemic year was challenging for many benefits-related solutions, Stork Club exited 2020 with 5x revenue growth, expanded their medical network to 250+ locations across the US, including such world industry leaders as CCRM, Boston IVF, Vios Fertility, CooperGenomics, as well as added a cohesive fertility pharmacy experience for its members — Stork Club Rx, which showed up to 75% in savings in Q1, 2021 in comparison with traditional PBMs.
Stork Club will use this funding to meet market demand and expand the line of family-related services to fill the gaps in modern maternity care to drive improvement in overall maternity-related clinical outcomes and member experience.
Learn more about the vision behind Stork Club.
About Stork Club
Stork Club modernizes healthcare for families and gives people the freedom to plan their future on their own terms. We extend traditional employee insurance benefits to give people, including LGTBQ families, all possible options to have a baby (including natural conception, IVF, adoption and surrogacy). Employers choose to add Stork Club to their benefits health plan to provide more inclusive support for their people while significantly reducing overall maternity costs ($130B per year in the US). Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, Stork Club has raised $32.7M from investors including, General Catalyst, Bowery Capital, and Slow Ventures. To learn more visit: joinstorkclub.com.
About General Catalyst
General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that invests in powerful, positive change that endures — for our entrepreneurs, our investors, our people, and society. We support founders with a long-term view who challenge the status quo, partnering with them from seed to growth stage and beyond to build companies that withstand the test of time. With offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York City, and Boston, the firm has helped support the growth of businesses such as: Airbnb, Deliveroo, Guild, Gusto, Hubspot, Illumio, Lemonade, Livongo, Oscar, Snap, Stripe, and Warby Parker. For more: www.generalcatalyst.com.
