The Product Nobody Had Built: Fertility Insurance You Own Yourself

Laura McDonald and Dr. Christy Lane are two founders based in Canada building for the US market, with seven children between them ranging in age from 4 to 20. They arrived at the same problem from opposite directions.

Laura scaled a financial media company in Canada into the largest in its space, learning how to engage women in conversations about risk and finance. She had three daughters back to back in her twenties and a son five years later, and describes taking for granted how straightforward conceiving was for her.

Christy experienced the other side. She spent eleven years in post-secondary education, and by the time she was ready to have children she struggled — going through many rounds of treatment roughly thirteen years ago, when, as she puts it, nobody was talking about infertility. She understood both the financial and emotional weight of it firsthand, with no one to talk to about either.

Her professional background is complementary rather than parallel: a full professor of rehabilitation medicine with more than twenty years in women’s health research, time at Stanford building a lab, and a prior company built and exited in life-side risk analytics. A mutual connection at a reinsurance company introduced them, knowing they were circling the same problem from different angles.

In Episode 134 of InsurTechTalk, Laura, Christy and I covered how they built a genuinely new insurance product, why the treatment spectrum matters more than IVF alone, and what it actually takes to get risk partners behind something that has never existed.

About Flora Fertility

Flora Fertility is an MGA offering the first individually owned fertility insurance policy — private coverage held in the policyholder’s own name, protecting future fertility risk with up to $50,000 in benefits. Structured as a specialty P&C product and distributed B2B2C, the company is roughly two years old, was built with support from InsurTech NY, and secured its fronting carrier and reinsurance panel in just over a year. At the time of recording it was 60 days from a near-nationwide US launch.

The Funding Gap

The problem Flora exists to solve is a financing gap that most people only discover when they are already inside it.

• Fertility treatment commonly runs $50,000 or more out of pocket — for some $10,000 to $20,000, for others $100,000
• Even high earners rarely have that available, and if they do, they need it after the baby arrives
• The existing options are narrow: loans and financing, which are better than a credit card but still mean paying for everything; or group benefits through Fortune 500 employers, which are excellent if you work at a large bank or Google, and irrelevant to most people
• Meanwhile private equity is rolling up fertility clinics and venture money is flowing into the space — the supply side is consolidating while the demand side remains largely unfunded

How the Policy Works

Version one is deliberately narrow, which is the correct instinct for a genuinely new risk.

• Open to women aged 20 to 34 with no known infertility
• Application is an online questionnaire — age, some medical history, lifestyle questions — with no blood tests or medical testing required upfront
• Coverage is usable up to age 45, even though eligibility to apply closes at 34
• Premiums are low and monthly, locked in at the age of entry and adjusted only for inflation, never for age — a 20-year-old might pay $15 to $20 a month
• The $50,000 limit is roughly double the industry standard; most group plans cap at $20,000 to $30,000, and some at $5,000 lifetime

Crucially, coverage spans the full treatment spectrum, not just IVF: first consultation with a fertility specialist, diagnostics, medications, IUI, and then IVF. Christy’s point here is the one most likely to be missed — of the one in six who need fertility treatment, only about 10% end up needing IVF. Most existing financing products target IVF specifically, leaving the majority of the pathway uncovered.

The policy also covers medically prescribed treatment only, though as Christy notes, stress is among the strongest predictors of both infertility and treatment success, so specialists frequently recommend interventions like acupuncture and meditation.

Building a Product That Did Not Exist

The hardest part was not the idea. It was convincing anyone to carry the risk.

• Christy built net-new actuarial underwriting by leveraging public and private data sets from her own research and career
• Securing risk partners is the point where most new insurance models die — it can take years or never happen at all. Flora did it in just over a year, landing both a fronting carrier and a reinsurance panel
• That, more than anything else, is what allows the product to reach market

Laura’s summary of the difficulty is worth keeping: many people hear the concept and say it is a no-brainer and ask why it does not already exist. The answer is that launching a genuinely new insurance product through an MGA model, with all the regulatory work and capacity partners involved, is an immense amount of work requiring exactly the right people.

Distribution: The Question Every New MGA Must Answer

Having a novel product and a novel risk makes the distribution question harder, not easier — you have to prove both that people want it and that you can reach them.

Three segments within the 20–34 band:

• 20 to 25 — the buyer is often the parent. Laura’s own framing: with a 20-year-old daughter, at $15 a month, she is already funding a college education and likely a home down payment, and fertility is the third major expense. The daughter’s risk to Flora is low, and the premium locks in early
• 25 to 30 — the core segment. Educated, in a first job, often not yet partnered, and starting to think seriously about this
• 30 to 34 — acutely aware, somewhat worried, and willing to pay higher premiums, with more disposable income to do so

Channels:

• B2B2C partnerships with menstrual tracking apps, fintech apps aimed at Gen Z, and women’s health platforms
• The SMB market, which Laura defines as up to around a thousand employees — companies too small or too cost-constrained for large group fertility benefits. Flora integrates by letting the employer co-pay or sponsor premiums while the policy stays in the employee’s name, portable if they leave

That portability matters commercially: Laura cites figures suggesting 50 to 80% of this demographic have changed jobs for fertility benefits, meaning SMBs are losing talent to large employers who can offer them. Flora levels that field affordably.

The Market Research

A large women’s health app partner with tens of millions of users surveyed its base:

• Over 50% of women in the younger segment are already concerned about their future fertility
• 35% said they would pay out of pocket for this type of product
• The US addressable segment is roughly 35 million women — which, as Christy pushes back, is not remotely a niche

Early demand testing supports it. With no incentive and a budget around $50 a day on Instagram, Flora accumulated roughly 3,000 waitlist signups in a couple of months. When the team asked that waitlist to help shape the brand, about 800 responded within a couple of hours, and a selected group contributed five to seven hours each, including video.

The Positioning: Optionality, Not Crisis

The brand deliberately avoids addressing people mid-crisis.

• Flora targets women years before treatment, so the message is empowering rather than sympathetic
• The framing is “plus motherhood” — you will be many things in your life, and motherhood may be among them: career, home, relationships, all on your own timeline
• Even “maybe baby,” acknowledging that a woman in her twenties may not know whether she wants children, and the point is preserving the option and the ability to afford it

Both founders were clear this is not a career-versus-motherhood proposition, nor an exclusion of men. Male infertility is a genuine cause of couple infertility, and partner coverage is on the roadmap. Starting with women as primary policyholders reflects two things: they tend to engage with this earlier, and they bear most of the treatments Flora covers. As Laura puts it, you start in one lane and expand once the reinsurers are comfortable.

Their broader thesis: women’s health is severely underfunded, and insurance is fundamentally a vehicle for pooling capital to fund underserved needs.

The Employer and Cultural Backdrop

We also got into how differently the US treats pregnancy compared with many other countries — where it falls under health insurance as a medical condition and leave is minimal. Laura’s read is that Gen Z and millennial demand is now driving new voluntary and flex benefit products around parental leave for both partners, and that employers are recognizing this as a recruitment and retention issue whether or not they say so openly.

Closing Lessons

Christy — her failure was personal rather than commercial. During her first company, which she built and successfully sold, work-life balance collapsed entirely: work, her husband, and her first daughter, and essentially nothing else. Eating well, sleeping, exercise, friends, wider family — all gone. Her advice to young entrepreneurs is not that perfect balance exists, but to be deliberate about how they spend their time even while hustling.

Laura — invest in founders who have failed, because they know how to pivot and recover. Her own lesson is about timing: build something people want, and make sure the moment is right. She has been involved in businesses that were simply too early, without enough investor appetite to sustain them. For Flora, that meant more than a year of research with VCs, apps, and health partners before committing, plus an early-stage venture investor who came in at the big-idea stage — validation that capital would be there as the business grew.

Key Takeaways

• Fertility financing is a real gap: treatment routinely costs $50,000-plus, and existing solutions are either loans or large-employer group benefits that most people cannot access
• Only about 10% of people needing fertility treatment need IVF, so covering the full spectrum — consultation, diagnostics, medications, IUI — reaches far more people than IVF-focused products
• Securing risk partners is where new insurance models usually die; doing it in just over a year is the single hardest thing Flora accomplished
• Locking premiums at entry age with inflation-only adjustment makes parents a viable buyer segment for policies covering their adult daughters
• Portable, individually owned policies let SMBs compete for talent against Fortune 500 fertility benefits
• Positioning years ahead of the crisis turns an insurance product into a message about optionality rather than misfortune
• Start in one lane; expansion to partner and male infertility coverage comes after the first product is proven and the reinsurers are comfortable