Maven Is Expanding to Help Employees Use Their Fertility Benefits

(Bloomberg) -- Maven, a telehealth company, has raised $45 million from Icon Ventures, Sequoia Capital and others as it expands to help employers make their family-planning benefits — like egg freezing, fertility treatments, surrogacy and adoption — easier for workers to use.

Maven launched in 2015 for women seeking services like lactation consultants, doulas and midwives and has since expanded to cover fertility, pediatrics and breast-milk shipping. Employers can buy such coverage for their workers, and workers can access Maven’s telehealth services through an app. The company is now capitalizing on a new wave of family-planning benefits that help support parents in the workplace. Maven will use the new funds to invest in its core digital offerings while expanding into other, related services.

This year, the company introduced Maven Wallet to manage an employer’s fertility or adoption benefits by allowing workers to use the platform to pay for services that can be costly. It works like this: If a company offers $10,000 for a worker to use fertility services, an employee can use Maven Wallet to find and pay for those services in a way that is designed to minimize claim rejections. Maven plans to use the funding to expand that offering to more employers.

“It helps employers offer more of these services to their employees in an easy and seamless way,” Chief Executive Officer Kate Ryder said. Maven also contracts with certain providers, assesses their success rates and offers discounts.

Maven isn’t really an industry disrupter, so much as an industry matchmaker. As more employers add more benefits, often with complex rules for those seeking reimbursement, the company is seeking to simplify the process and help more workers access their company’s offerings. Maven has more than 100 clients including Snap, the Hartford and BuzzFeed, according to a release from the company.

“Six years ago when I founded the company,” Ryder said, “this was very much perceived as a niche industry.” She has seen companies take a more active role in improving benefits for working parents in recent years — from expanding paid leave to offering services like Maven for workers. “I think that’s evidenced in our own growth trajectory,” she said.

Infertility is fairly common: Nearly 13 percent of couples in the U.S. have trouble getting pregnant, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 2019, about 20% of companies offered fertility benefits, according to a survey of 2,763 employers by the Society for Human Resource Management. Nearly three-quarters of companies offered a telehealth benefit.

The $45 million round of fundraising is the company’s third. In 2018, Maven announced it had brought in some $27 million from investors. Tom Mawhinney, an investor from Icon Ventures, will join the board as a result of the latest fundraising.

“What Maven’s doing is right,” he said of the venture capital firm’s thinking on the investment. “It’s an offering that makes all the sense in the world for employers to offer.”

Other investors include the Female Founders Fund and individuals like 23andMe Inc. Chief Executive Officer Anne Wojcicki and actresses Reese Witherspoon, Natalie Portman and Mindy Kaling.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net, Rebecca Greenfield

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