Stork Club, the company on a mission to modernize healthcare and give people the freedom to build a family on their own terms, has announced its $30M Series A 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 extends 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.
“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.”
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.
“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 designed a 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 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.”
