The Kindbody Story: E1, The Fertility Spa

0:00So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Support for this show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions.

0:37Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API.

1:17Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Healthcare doesn't always work great. If you've ever waited on a refill or couldn't schedule an appointment, you get it. That's the kind of stuff Optum is changing. They're using data and technology to integrate patient care, pharmacy, and everything else.

1:53So healthcare is connected, not complicated. What's that look like? Cheaper prescriptions that are easier to get and care that looks at the whole person. How you need it. Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Learn more at business.optum.com. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. This episode features conversations about pregnancy complications and loss. Please take care while listening. In 2018, a brand new fertility company started building clinics across the country. Introducing KindBody, a new generation of women's health and fertility care. KindBody promised an entirely different approach to fertility.

2:41We believe that going to the doctor should feel like a visit with a trusted friend, where you can get all the care you need in one place. And in a world where costs are notoriously high and outcomes notoriously uncertain, for lots of women, this new approach sounded really appealing.

3:03My co-worker, we were walking past the Kind Body and she said, oh my God, look, they look so good. They're supposed to be really amazing. They're geared toward women and helping women and women's health. I saw it and was like, women doctors, and the way they made it seem like it was just so easy to do and seamless. Right away, I just was like, oh yeah, this is the easiest choice I've had to make. The vibe, it looked like it was just straight out of West Elm or something. It was very inviting for you to want to come in and sit in the bright colors and just really relaxing, almost like you were going to go get a massage, to be honest.

3:37I saw the aesthetics of it. I was so excited. I was like, finally, a place is going to get it. It's going to pamper our patients, give them that TLC that they need. You just got the feeling you were going to be taken care of and you weren't just a number and part of the masses. So I was like, great. And the company's founder, Gina Bartesi, had big plans to turn a lot more women into kindbody converts. We're opening in Washington, D.C. We're opening Brooklyn, a third location in New York. We're actually coming to Columbus before we're coming to Cleveland. Our plan costs for 50 locations within the next two years.

4:18That's Gina Bartesi speaking to Griffin Jones on the Inside Reproductive Health podcast in 2022. Under Gina, Kindbody grew quickly. The company had signed lucrative contracts with Tesla and Walmart. It bought a competing IVF chain, doubling the number of clinics it operated. Company leaders rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Its valuation had reached$1.8 billion, and it seemed to be only going up. An initial public offering was in sight. It was around this time, in 2023, that KindBody got on the radar of Jackie DeValos, a Bloomberg tech reporter. I first heard about KindBody when its ads started showing up in my Instagram and TikTok feeds, encouraging me to think about freezing my eggs.

5:09I was right in its demographic. A professional woman in her early 30s, living in a big city. The company seemed to be offering something new, combining the vibe of a health club or spa with a part of medicine that can deliver pretty miraculous and life-changing outcomes. I got curious, so I started making some calls. And right away, it became clear that things at Kind Body were not as they appeared.

5:38This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. And I'm Jackie DeBalos. Today on the show, the first episode of a new five-part series, IVF Disrupted, The Kind Body Story, from Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts. We'll hear the first three episodes through the weekend, and the rest next weekend. I'll let Jackie take it from here.

6:07I've talked to lots of former KindBody patients and employees, and many of them told me they felt disillusioned by their experiences with the company. When you take the rose-colored glasses off, because at first you don't want to see it, right? As I slowly start to say to myself, oh, this is not good. I should have done more research. I should have been looking into this more, and I would have found so much more. Looking back on that, I see it as a red flag now. I kind of had like a mental breakdown. I felt like I was lying to my patients and I'm just not that kind of person. And it just really broke my spirit.

6:41I'm like shaking just thinking about it. And it was a real pressing on all of us to go faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. And when you go faster, sometimes you miss an exit. I remember I was trying to collect payment for one of the services. And I couldn't collect the payment. And then my manager was like, oh, ha ha ha ha ha, we do it this way because he's in prison.

7:12I spent the last two and a half years trying to understand KindBody and how it fits into the larger fertility industry in the U.S. I've talked to more than 100 current and former employees and 50 former patients. I've seen internal company documents and heard from executives and investors about the company's finances and strategy. Along the way, I had a front row seat as the rocket ship sputtered. Kindbody declined to speak on the record for this podcast. But over the course of my reporting, it has acknowledged some incidents. The company said these are not unique to Kindbody and pointed to some other examples of errors across the fertility industry.

7:56And this is true. There are problems across fertility. But Kindbody is unique in that it is one of the fastest-growing players in the field. And its story shows some of the consequences of that rapid growth. Kindbody was pitched as a startup. And their approach will be familiar to anyone who knows about the saying, move fast and break things. That approach is mostly associated with consumer tech companies. but the lack of regulations in the fertility industry made it relatively easy to try it there too. I wanted to know what happens when a startup takes on one of the most intimate decisions in our lives.

8:37Making a baby, where the stakes are high, the customers are vulnerable, and people's dreams of starting a family hang in the balance.

9:02Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions, buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English, like if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve of the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions and executing your strategies exactly as defined.

9:41An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Wise is the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. If you've ever sent money internationally using a traditional bank, there's a good chance you've paid more than you realized.

10:22Hidden fees, exchange rate markups, and extra charges can quietly add up before your money even arrives. There's a better way. Try Wise. Wise uses the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google, helping you avoid the unwelcome surprises that often come with international transfers. Whether you're sending money to family overseas, spending while on your holiday abroad, or paying bills across borders, Wise makes moving money simple, transparent, and straightforward. Wise offers 24-7 customer service and runs over 7 million daily checks to spot and stop fraud. And most transfers happen in under 20 seconds, which means your money arrives in less time than you've been listening to me.

11:01Join millions, saving billions. Be smart. Get Wise. Visit wise.com or download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply.

11:13The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. To understand Kindbody, first, you need to understand the woman behind the company, Gina Bartesi. Gina, who is now in her 50s, has been in the fertility industry for nearly 20 years.

11:57So she's a well-known player. When Gina talks about her career in fertility, she always starts with her own story. She declined an interview for this series, but here she is telling it back in 2022 in a conversation with reporter Kristen V. Brown. At 38, I was eating well, I was working out all the time, and you have this false presumption that, oh, I'm a healthy person, I don't have any issues with my infertility. So we tried on our own for about the first six months, and then after six months, so many of my friends had gone through IVF and had success and had babies, and I was like, okay, we'll just go through IVF.

12:32But I can remember how, like, I was aghast. I knew it was going to be expensive, but even when he told me how much it was going to cost, I was like, wow, that's really expensive. Before starting Kind Body, Gina had founded another fertility startup, an IVF referral network which became known as Progeny. Progeny was a middleman between employers and fertility clinics. and negotiated the price of treatments with clinics by buying in bulk and then sold those packages to employers who offered them to their staff in their health insurance plans. Gina was in on the ground floor of a quickly expanding market.

13:11Now, the science of fertility is relatively new, but the business is booming. The upsurge is fueled by shifts in social norms, millennials putting off having kids, rising rates of infertility. One research firm, iMark, placed the global fertility market at$46 billion in 2024 and said that it would more than triple in the next decade. The demand has spelled opportunity for investors, from venture capital to private equity, who want to cash in on the lucrative business of fertility. And Gina's company, Progeny, became one of the biggest players in the industry and went public in 2019. But by the time Progeny IPO'd, Gina had left and was hard at work at her new company, Kindbody.

14:06With Kindbody, Gina dreamed even bigger. Progeny was just connecting company employees to medical providers. Kindbody did that too. But it would also be the medical provider. It would own the clinics. It would employ the doctors. It would treat the patients. What I learned after kind of being middleman with my previous businesses is the only way to control for patient experience, patient outcomes and cost is that you must be in the provision of care. So today we are in the care delivery business at our clinics. You see we have our own physicians, medical assistants, nurse practitioners to really prioritize the patient experience and reinvent family building care.

14:51That point Gina made about controlling costs, that was a big deal. Kindbody was promising to make fertility care more accessible by making it cheaper. IVF is very expensive. The average cost of one round of treatment is about$23 ,000. That's according to Fertility IQ, a platform that tracks prices and reviews for clinics. Most patients end up doing two or three rounds before getting pregnant. Kindbody promised to make all of this more efficient with its own medical record and patient portal software. And by building and running its own clinics and labs, Kindbody said it could control every aspect of operations and ultimately offer fertility treatment at a cheaper price.

15:41It would be part of a wave of startups, femtech companies, catering to women's health. The company had plans to offer an unusually wide range of services. It wanted to be the place where women would come for regular gynecology checkups, but also for IVF, egg freezing, embryo transfers, and storage for eggs, sperm, and embryos. There was nowhere else that offered this kind of one-stop shopping for fertility services. We are the doctors. We are the clinics. We are your end-to-end family building solution. Gina herself wasn't a doctor. Her expertise was in marketing. Early on, other people in the industry questioned whether someone without that medical knowledge actually understood how to put something like this together.

16:34I spoke to a dozen investors and founders of large chains of fertility clinics about Kindbody at the time. And they told me that they were skeptical that a startup could offer so many services at once. But of course, if you're a startup founder, having the incumbents tell you that you don't understand how things work can kind of feel like a sign you're on to something big. Here's Gina. So I get those criticisms. If you're the old guard or you're the legacy clinic and you've not changed in 30 years that somebody comes and disrupts the business, I don't anticipate them to go away anytime soon. Gina envisioned her new company as a consumer brand.

17:18She was inspired by SoulCycle and Drybar. Kindbody would have a millennial-friendly aesthetic. Clinics wouldn't be tucked away in a hospital. They'd be in storefronts and shopping malls and on busy streets with lots of foot traffic. Right next to the Barry's boot camps and the trendy juice bars. Here she is on CNBC in 2021. We believe in this consumerism of health care. You have to bring care to the patient. There is a retail nature to Kind Body. It's funny because not everyone agrees that health care is like any other consumer product. But for Gina, the experience of being a patient was just as important as the treatment itself.

18:00The lobby would have to be as carefully designed as the exam room. I think historically in healthcare, you really didn't think about your patient as your customer, right? You didn't think about hospitality. And we want to be intentional. How can we think about the robes that are more comfortable? How can we have cold water in the lobby? Healthcare is not wired like that. Almost every other industry is. Restaurants are. Retail is. Think about everything else is built around you. Gina had this idea to house everything under one roof, including the lab, where eggs and sperm are handled and where embryos are actually made.

18:39Until this point, most fertility clinics looked like a typical doctor's office. Patients seeking IVF treatment would usually go to a clinic that was operated by a university health system, like Cornell, Stanford, Northwestern, or a smaller, privately-owned clinic. They aren't exciting, vibey spaces on busy streets next to restaurants and boutiques. This was Gina's radically new idea. It would take a long time to build this sort of clinic. But Kind Body wanted to start attracting patients early. So it started constructing what it called mobile clinics. These were basically trailers, like the ones you would find on a movie set.

19:23The exteriors were painted with Kindbody's signature pastel yellow with the message, your fertility understood, in big, bold letters. Anyone off the street could go inside and take a free hormone test that measured roughly how many eggs they had left. We're here in front of our third mobile pop-up event, and we're here talking to women about their fertility. Here's an early Kind Body executive back in 2018 talking about a mobile clinic. This video comes from the website Well and Good's YouTube channel. So in the van, you will talk to our fertility specialist. A nurse will draw your blood and take a test, which is called the AMH test.

20:04We get your results back, and we send you a report that fully contextualizes what you need to know and helps you understand what your next steps might be. The first mobile clinic opened up in Manhattan on the corner of 25th Street and 5th Avenue, right near Madison Square Park. Kind Body took the bus on the road to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Hamptons. The hormone test was a great promotional tool. The results gave women the feeling of empowerment and control. If results showed eggs were dwindling, Kind Body said no problem, just freeze them. No need to stop your career to have children.

20:42Early on, this was Kindbody's message to women, particularly young women. Most women who seek IVF are typically in their late 30s or 40s. But Kindbody wanted to reach them sooner. In 2018, Gina told The Verge, What we want to do is help women live a life of no regrets and have children, when they want them, on their own time frame. End quote. This was a bold proposition. Egg freezing does not automatically guarantee a future pregnancy. Sometimes eggs don't survive thawing. And even if they do, some might not fertilize. It's not a perfect science. And it's very new. Some experts at the time criticized Kindbody for selling false hope and a misguided sense of security.

21:35But for others working in the field, KindBody's mission and messaging represented a welcome change for an industry that seems set in its ways. We'll be right back.

22:05AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve of the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less.

22:45That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Wise is the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. If you've ever sent money internationally using a traditional bank, there's a good chance you've paid more than you realized. Hidden fees, exchange rate markups, and extra charges can quietly add up before your money even arrives. There's a better way. Try Wise.

23:21Wise uses the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google, helping you avoid the unwelcome surprises that often come with international transfers. Whether you're sending money to family overseas, spending while on your holiday abroad, or paying bills across borders, Wise makes moving money simple, transparent, and straightforward. Wise offers 24-7 customer service and runs over 7 million daily checks to spot and stop fraud. And most transfers happen in under 20 seconds, which means your money arrives in less time than you've been listening to me. Join millions saving billions. Be smart. Get Wise.

23:55Visit Wise.com or download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply.

24:03So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise, proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off. deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Many former employees I spoke to, who joined KindBody in the early years, tell me they were drawn in. They loved the mission, the beauty, the way the company presented itself.

24:47One of those early employees was Tracy Sosa, a medical assistant who's been working in healthcare for 20 years. She was recruited in 2020 to work at KindBody's clinic in Princeton, New Jersey. When she started, the clinic wasn't up and running yet. But Tracy had the sense that this company was different. Once I Googled and I researched and I looked, I saw the aesthetics of it. I'm getting goosebumps right now just talking to you about it. I was so excited. Tracy accepted the job. And together with her coworkers, she set up the clinic from scratch. We were unpacking boxes. We were decorating. It was there in there.