How Kindbody's Gina Bartasi Is Chasing The $84 Billion Business Opportunity In Family-Building

Forbes

Gina Bartasi founded fertility-care network Kindbody in 2018 and has grown it into a $1.8 billion (valuation) company. She talked to ForbesWomen editor Maggie McGrath about why that number is poised to grow.   Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00 Hi everyone, I'm Maggie McGrath, editor of Forbes Women, and we are here at the Nasdaq

00:04 Market site with Gina Bartese. She is the founder and executive chair of Kindbody.

00:10 It's a leading fertility company, female-founded, female-led,

00:14 and it was just named as the Women Presidents Organization's number one fastest-growing company.

00:19 Gina, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you, Maggie. Thank you,

00:26 Forbes, and thank you, WPO, for the recognition. We'll get into the recognition and exactly how

00:31 you achieved that, but I have heard you referred to as the OG fertility entrepreneur. And in fact,

00:38 you founded your first fertility company in 2009, which, if we take a look back, the American

00:45 Society for Reproductive Medicine did not declare egg freezing as anything more than experimental

00:50 until 2013. So you were a few years before that. What was the business opportunity you saw when

00:56 founding that first fertility company? Yeah, I think I look like many New Yorkers. We're here

01:01 at Nasdaq in the heart of New York City, and it's not just New Yorkers, right? But I was in my mid

01:07 30s. I was not married. I met my husband out east. We dated a couple of years, and then we got married

01:14 at 38. And to me, again, as a serial entrepreneur, I've always looked to solve problems. And when

01:21 you're in your late 30s, you assume you're healthy, you eat well, that fertility is not going to be an

01:27 issue, but it is. Your age is the number one predictor of whether or not you're going to have

01:32 success. So I did. I started a company in 2009. There's been quite a bit of change since 2009.

01:41 The fertility industry in and of itself is still a relatively young industry. It's only about three

01:46 decades old. So lots of change in the last 15 years, and certainly a tremendous amount of change

01:51 over the last three decades, and change is coming at a more rapid pace. Talk about change. I saw a

01:57 report that says the fertility industry globally is expected to hit $84 billion by 2028, and that's

02:04 just one report. How are you navigating this change specifically through Kindbody? Yeah, so the change

02:10 is macroeconomic driven, right? I talked about not being the only female in their mid-30s living in

02:16 New York City as a single female. I used to think when I first got into the industry that the

02:21 fertility industry only affected bi-coast women in large cities. That was in New York and LA and San

02:27 Francisco. And what we know today is it affects everyone in the United States. In fact, it's a

02:32 global issue. A decade ago, one in eight couples struggled with fertility. Today, that is one in

02:39 five. And so you just see these macroeconomic trends as women wait until longer to get married.

02:44 They wait to have children. Same-sex couples are having children at a rate never before seen. And

02:51 so you just have these macroeconomic reasons of the growth in the fertility industry.

02:58 Where that came from to start Kindbody is lessons learned from my previous company. My previous

03:06 company is a public company. It's the only fertility company that's public, that's progeny.

03:10 And employers today really want to buy direct. They want to buy direct from doctors. They want

03:15 to buy, you know, if we look at digital health, which was wildly popular over the last five years,

03:21 we would call those digital health, those care navigation solutions, kind of V1, right? V1 in

03:26 the industry. Kindbody and actually being in the provision of care. Today, we have 34 fertility

03:32 clinics around the country. We'll have 37 by the end of the summer. What employers want today is

03:37 the ability to effectuate cost, quality, and outcome. And you can only do that by being in

03:43 the provision of care. So we really think about Kindbody and serving today's women's health and

03:49 fertility needs as V2, as the next iteration, a much better, smarter mousetrap that the employers

03:55 have been asking for, for certainly more than five years, almost a decade now, is this direct

04:01 contracting solution. - So you directly employ doctors?

04:04 - We do. Well, the best, in my opinion. I'm a little biased for sure. But yes, we have our own

04:11 doctors, reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialists who are double certified in both REI

04:18 and OB/GYN, and our clinical care team. So our doctors are supported by outstanding PAs and

04:24 NPs and MAs and sonographers and nurses. So it is an entire clinical care team that envelops the

04:31 patient to ensure kindness. When I went through fertility treatment, my boys, I have twin boys,

04:37 they'll be 13 next month. But I found a lack of empathy and kindness in healthcare. And when I

04:44 would go into any clinic, the doctors were white, they wore white coats, the walls were white. And

04:50 I was like, wow, this is white. And this has to be, our mission at Kind Body is to democratize

04:56 fertility care, is to make it more affordable for all, black, brown, purple, straight, trans, gay,

05:03 everybody should have access to fertility treatment. And I just, after the experience I had

05:08 where there was a lack of empathy and everything seemed very homogenous, we wanted to democratize

05:14 care so that even the cashier at Walmart could afford fertility treatment.

05:18 - How do you do that? Because fertility treatment can cost 15, 20, $25,000,

05:24 depending on a person's situation, depending on their insurance, depending on their location.

05:29 How are you bringing that cost down and what is the average cost for a Kind Body customer?

05:34 - Yeah, so the number one thing that drives whether that price is 15, 20, 25 is the doctor.

05:41 Okay, the doctor sets his or her own prices. They could deliver care for $10,000, $15,000,

05:47 $25,000, $30,000. So in order to effectuate change in healthcare, specific to what it's going to cost

05:56 the employer or the employee or the patient, you have to be in the provision of care. So that was,

06:02 again, when I was sitting in the middle, I couldn't really tell the doctors what to take

06:08 in terms of reimbursements. MCOs, managed care organizations and payers have a similar challenge.

06:13 The doctors will be in or out of network depending on reimbursements, but only the

06:17 doctor can control for cost. So once I learned that only the doctor could control for cost and

06:23 our mission was to bring down the cost of care, we are in the provision of care intentionally.

06:28 We utilize technology. We have our own proprietary patient portal and electronic medical record. It's

06:34 called Kind EMR. So we use technology to bring down the cost and our cost will save the average

06:40 employer 20 to 25 percent and the patient see the same savings. Interesting. And I think

06:47 Kind Body reported that it was on track for $180 million in revenue for fiscal 2023.

06:53 As we started this conversation saying WPO named Kind Body as the fastest growing female-led

06:59 startup within its organization. What is driving that growth? Is it the technology? Is it the

07:06 healthcare evolution? Is it consumer demand? Is it all of the above? Yeah, it is all of the above.

07:11 So at Kind Body, we serve three constituencies. We serve employers. We have 122 large employers.

07:17 We also serve patients. About 20 percent of our patient population are consumers that just walk

07:22 into our locations off the street. And then our third revenue channel after employers and patients

07:28 are the MCOs. We are in network with all of the large major payers and they're seeing this

07:33 tremendous growth. The growth of the industry is driven by patient demand, right? Many patients

07:40 a decade or more didn't freeze eggs, didn't go through IVF. Same-sex couples lived more often

07:46 than not child free or they adopted. Today, those same-sex couples have access to fertility

07:51 treatment through our own in-house surrogacy adoption services. So we really offer an end-to-end

07:58 care delivery and solution for employers or patients. So everything's vertically integrated.

08:03 If you need PGT, pre-implantation genetic testing for your embryos, surrogacy, men's health, we do

08:11 all male infertility services. So what we want to do again is envelop the patient in kindness and

08:18 make sure they're not shuffled from one provider to the other. In the healthcare industry, that's

08:23 pretty common and you lose sight, you lose care for that patient. And at Kind Body, the goal is

08:29 to keep that patient under the same roof. So to make the patient journey significantly easier and

08:35 kinder on the patient. And to have a holistic look at the healthcare picture. And to have a holistic

08:40 look. In fact, our whole women's healthcare solution is called Kind Body 360, right? We

08:45 want you to be 360 holistic care. We've talked about the growth of the industry. I feel like

08:50 I get a new pitch for a new fertility company in my inbox every week. How are you navigating the

08:55 competitive landscape when there are so many new entrants looking to do similar work? Yeah,

09:00 we welcome new entrants. For us to win, no one else has to lose. It is that early in the game

09:06 of kind of this fertility knowledge, fertility industry. So we like the companies coming into

09:13 the space. I do a fair amount of mentoring young female entrepreneurs. And as long as the new

09:21 entrants, when they really first start a company, they need to think in terms of scale, right?

09:26 You mentioned the 180 million last year, we're tracking to close to 250 million this year. We

09:32 had our first profitable month last month. After you invest heavily, it's called the J curve in

09:39 venture capital financing. You invest in the business, you invest in the business, and then

09:43 there's this vertical access, excuse me, the horizontal access, and that's your break-even

09:47 line. So we were profitable last month in March of 2024, which we're incredibly proud of. But we

09:54 want these new entrants to come. I think when I want to and take great pleasure in mentoring

10:01 young, particularly female founders, just think in terms of scales. The first thing I ask young

10:06 female entrepreneurs is how big can your business get? And when they say, can get $10 million,

10:11 that used to be, I mean, $10 million is a lot of money for sure, but that's not a venture-backed

10:16 business. I mean, $10 million is actually not a very big number for venture investors to put

10:21 money behind. They need to be thinking in terms of multi-billion dollar exit strategies.

10:25 So how big can KindBody get to thrive?

10:27 KindBody is a multi-billion dollar company. We think about expansion efforts outside of

10:33 the United States. Certainly our employers have global employees. We serve those today

10:38 via a network, but I anticipate you'll see KindBody London and KindBody Dublin and KindBody

10:44 Singapore within the next three to five years.

10:46 So as we talk about geographic expansion, I'm curious about jurisdictional rules on

10:50 reproductive health. Earlier this year, we saw the ruling out of the Alabama Supreme Court that

10:55 affected IVF. Globally, it gets more complicated, but just let's talk about here at home. How is

11:01 the American political landscape affecting the way you think about building and growing your business?

11:06 Yeah, well, we will continue to be vigilant in our efforts and in our mission to make sure that

11:13 all women and men have high quality care to build the family they want. So we are in the

11:18 family building industry. Certainly when Alabama passed a ruling prohibiting IVF and IVF centers

11:26 in Alabama took a pause. At that time, I think there were some questions about IVF, particularly

11:32 in the red states. What was great for the industry and a real reward for our patient population

11:39 is that this was a bipartisan issue, that they actually reversed that decision in Alabama,

11:44 and they are now protecting IVF and fertility doctors. So again, what was something we didn't

11:50 anticipate is bipartisan support. You saw both Republicans and Democrats come out pretty

11:57 irreverent in protecting IVF, and everybody wants to build more families, particularly with a

12:05 declining population. The United States and other countries have declining populations. So today,

12:10 the concern that was exhibited six weeks ago when the Alabama ruling came through,

12:16 that same concern does not exist today. So your customers don't seem as confused as they were?

12:21 They don't. We see utilization continuing to increase across all states, across the United

12:26 States. And then again, as we think about expanding globally, you see increased utilization,

12:31 increased patient volume in Canada, in the UK, in Europe, in Australia, and other developed countries,

12:38 but then in other developing countries as well. So again, what you learn is fertility is not a

12:47 white heterosexual 1% privileged benefit. It used to be. It should not be any longer.

12:56 It affects everybody. And so at Kind Body, our mission remains to democratize care

13:00 so that everybody can afford the family they want.

13:03 So you achieved profitability in March. And I was curious, because if you think about the

13:07 variabilities of the human body and biology, how do you balance profitability and the search for

13:13 profitability with all the variabilities that can come with egg retrieval, with successful IVF

13:18 procedures, with how much patients are willing to pay?

13:21 Yeah, I think most importantly, you have to stay close to your patient, your consumer, right?

13:26 And you have to listen to them. You have to listen to your teammates. The success of any business,

13:35 I've always said, is about people. And at Kind Body, our clinical team members are really the

13:40 ones that are taking care of our patients. And so if we say we can prioritize taking care of

13:45 our clinical team members, our clinical team members will take care of our patients. If we

13:48 take care of our patients, they'll take care of our profits. So it's in that order, right?

13:52 Teammates, patients, profits for our investors.

13:56 You are a founder of five different companies. So I think that qualifies you as a serial

14:01 entrepreneur. I want to ask you about the first one, because it happened while you were a student

14:06 at UNC. You not only founded it, but there was an acquisition. Tell us about that first

14:11 entrepreneurial experience. Yeah, I grew up in a very middle-class

14:15 family in North Carolina, and I needed to make some extra income. I waited tables,

14:21 but I also wanted to make some extra income. So I was an artist. So I painted the 18 bars in

14:26 Chapel Hill. And my dad was like, I sent you to college, and you painted the 18 bars? How do you

14:30 know about these bars? Anyway, I knew about the bars. So I painted this canvas and then made prints

14:37 of it and sold the prints to other students. But what it taught me is this grit and determination

14:46 from the very beginning to bootstrap. I think the entrepreneurs who start with bootstrap businesses

14:51 first and then go on to raise venture capital have a better understanding of a P&L, the grit,

14:58 the hard work, the determination, the work ethic that it takes to get something to scale.

15:02 But no kidding, yeah, they sold hotcakes. And then one of my girlfriend's fathers was like,

15:08 I'll buy this company from you. And he bought it. It was like $3,400, which was a lot of money to a

15:13 college student. So he was like, I'll buy it for $3,400. I didn't even think I negotiated. I was

15:18 like, $3,400 sold. I probably should have negotiated. But anyway, it was a lot of money

15:24 to a senior at Chapel Hill. That would have been a lot of money to me as a senior as well. Well,

15:29 that's a good learning experience. And it sounds like it gave you the entrepreneurial itch.

15:34 What do you think is the number one learning you've had as a serial entrepreneur and that

15:37 you would advise anyone watching this who wants to become an entrepreneur themselves?

15:41 Yeah, we've talked a little bit about it, but nothing's going to be hard work and dedication,

15:47 humility, finding like-minded people. I think when you're interviewing others, if they say,

15:54 I need work-life balance, and I don't work on the weekends, and I don't work after hours,

15:58 it's hard to build a startup with that mentality. So you have to find like-minded teammates who are

16:05 ready to run through a brick wall to create more families for those who have previously been able

16:11 to afford building their families. But those are things, is finding like-minded teammates,

16:21 finding like-minded family, friends, others who understand I can't do this because I made

16:25 the other decision to do this. And I will tell you the other thing is as you get older,

16:32 it does get easier. It gets easier to fundraise. It gets easier to spot new hires. It gets easier

16:38 to spot answers for challenges. Every business has challenges. But most of the challenges we face at

16:45 KindBody or any company, I've been at this a while, and most of the challenges we have, I've

16:51 seen before. So you can get to the answer faster. But I'm going to tell you again that returning to

16:57 your customer and what's most important in this case at KindBody for your patient is going to

17:02 drive the right outcome for any entrepreneur at any time. Stay close to your customer.

17:07 Interesting. It's interesting that you say that it's gotten easier. We ask a lot of the women

17:12 who've been on the 50/50 if their work is easier as someone over 50 or if it's harder because of

17:18 their age, because age discrimination is a thing. But it sounds like experience has been a boon to

17:23 you and your business. It has. Again, I think in other congratulations on the Forbes 50/50,

17:29 the list was fantastic. And I saw, like I can imagine some of the actresses and celebrities

17:35 where it may be a disadvantage to be on a show today as an actress. In the business world,

17:42 it actually gets much easier. You're comfortable in the boardroom. You're comfortable with

17:47 financial statements. So it is a benefit. I don't think I'm the only one that would say that. Any

17:52 other 50-year-old plus CEO, executive, they don't have to be a CEO. They would just say

17:58 with age comes wisdom and with wisdom comes confidence. And that's what it really takes

18:03 to be a successful C-suite executive in today's market. If we speak a year from now, you were just

18:10 named the fastest growing company within the WPO. What do you wish to be able to report to me about

18:15 Kind Bodies growth and/or the fertility industry as a whole? Yeah, we remain on this mission to

18:22 continue to democratize care. I still think there are these fertility deserts and we think about

18:29 how we can serve care in the Dakotas, in Wyoming. How can we bring more care and more convenience

18:34 to patients at home? We shouldn't require patients to come into the clinic if there's an easier way

18:39 for them to access treatment from home. So I think in a year from now, from a patient standpoint,

18:46 again, is creating more convenience and more accessibility to the patients.

18:49 I think from a business standpoint, from an investor standpoint,

18:55 Kind Body, we'll see how the public markets look in 2025. What's great for Kind Body is we're

19:01 EBITDA positive. The next milestone in the journey of a company is to be cashflow positive. Delighted

19:08 to share with Forbes and you, Maggie, no one else knows this yet, but we're anticipating to be

19:12 cashflow positive six months from now. So before the end of the year, we'll be both EBITDA positive

19:17 and cashflow positive. What that means for a public offering in 2025 is that we can decide

19:23 when the time for us to go is. We don't have any investors. We have very patient capital. Our

19:27 investors have been strong supporters to our team and to the mission of the company. So if the public

19:33 markets really reopen, there've been a few IPOs in 2024, but if they come back in a more robust

19:38 fashion, Kind Body will certainly be in a position to go public. But we'll take our time. We'll have

19:45 a tremendous alignment amongst our team members again, in that same order, with our team members

19:50 and our clinical care team. Our patients are excited for us and then our investors will kind

19:55 of come last because they, our investors clearly understand if we take care of our teammates and

20:00 our patients, everything else will come. So what I'm hearing is we might be meeting at the NASDAQ

20:04 again in the future. We may. We love NASDAQ. We also love the NYSC. So there are two great

20:09 exchanges to take a company public. Well, Gina, thank you for joining us at NASDAQ today. We so

20:15 appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you, Maggie. Thank you, NASDAQ. And thank you, WPO.

20:18 Thank you.

20:19 [end]

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