Tech
Here’s an exclusive look at the pitch deck Nodal used to raise $4.7 million from investors like Amplo and a slew of women’s health founders to transform the surrogacy world
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- Nodal is launching with technology that aims to drastically cut the cost of surrogacy.
- The startup’s platform matches surrogate mothers with prospective parents they want to work with.
- Unlike traditional agencies, Nodal allows surrogate mothers to pick families they want to work with.
For hopeful parents struggling with infertility, surrogacy can be an option to grow their family — although it’s often an expensive and lengthy process.
Nodal, a startup aiming to help navigate the complexity of surrogacy, is officially coming out of stealth with a $4.7 million seed round it raised earlier this year led by Amplo.
Great Oaks Venture Capital and Interplay Venture Capital also participated in the round alongside health-tech startup founders Scott Belsky of Behance, Chelsea Hirschhorn of Frida, and Kate Ryder of Maven Clinic. Nodal was previously incubated by Pareto Holdings, the firm founded by Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer.
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Nodal is a surrogacy-matching platform that uses tech to connect surrogate mothers with prospective parents. Unlike at a traditional surrogacy agency where parents choose from potential surrogates, the startup gives surrogate mothers the power to choose families they would like to work with and lets them make the first connection.
Brian Levine, a doctor who is board certified in reproductive endocrinology, infertility, obstetrics and gynecology, founded Nodal based on his experience advising patients at CCRM Fertility Clinic New York, which he also founded. He said that he struggled with surrogacy recommendations given the high cost — up to $125,000 per child — of unseen expenses and potential years of waiting.
“I hit this moment last summer where I decided I didn’t think I could actually continue to have these conversations with patients unless I fixed the problem,” he told Insider. “There’s a bottleneck in the system that’s causing patients to wait longer and pay more, so I decided to tackle that problem up front.”
In the traditional surrogacy process, Levine said that agencies struggle to make matches quickly and are slow to screen for conditions and gather medical records, all of which creates a lack of transparency when it comes to time and costs. At Nodal, the startup charges $6,000 for a match. Prospective parents pay $500 per month to join the platform for the first six months. After paying that monthly fee, they only pay the remaining $3,000 when they make a match.
Few surrogacy-specific startups exist in the broader fertility space, into which investors poured $345 million in 2021. Expecting, a free fertility database, launched last year and raised $1 million from a list of undisclosed US and Israeli investors. And fertility startup Kindbody acquired a Chicago surrogacy agency this summer.
Nodal is launching with 30 surrogates and six times as many prospective parents and hopes to grow its team in time. The startup is also hoping to partner with existing surrogacy agencies to provide its tech-enabled matching service in order to reduce costs and pass along savings to parents.
Check out the 8-slide pitch deck Nodal used to raise its seed round:
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