Just two years after selling her public-relations firm?Bevel, founder Jessica Schaefer is back — bringing her branding skills to a completely new business: a wellness company for women with a?focus on fertility.
Lushi connects users with concierge doctors and nurses to help with egg freezing and IVF.
“No one’s done it … the venture capitalists kept saying, ‘We’ve never seen this before,’” Schaefer, 38, explained of the company’s commitment to handling every step of a women’s fertility journey — from monitoring hormones to handling bloodwork to education on the entire process.
“There are so many B2B payments companies and AI startups but this is actually a real need.”
Fertility is already a $30 billion industry and expected to balloon over the next few years, according to Grand View Research.
Celebrities like Chrissy Teigen, Emma Roberts and Kourtney Kardashian have shared their fertility stories in recent years, and TikTok and Instagram videos of women getting real about their reproductive health have gotten millions of views.
Schaefer, who ran communications for Steve Cohen at Point 72 before leaving to start her own firm, came to this from a personal angle. When she decided, at age 35, to freeze her own eggs, she assumed the process would be straightforward — especially given the tens of thousands of dollars she was paying out of pocket.
But when she prematurely injected one hormone, it meant having to re-do the entire process — another month of treatment, hormones and recovery, as well as the massive bill that accompanied it.
One egg-freezing session can cost upwards of $25,000 (as can a round of IVF) and require self-administering up to 42 injections over the span of several weeks before egg retrieval at a clinic.
“It’s very complicated,” Schaefer said. “You wouldn’t go get Botox, take the syringes home and do it yourself, right? So I don’t understand why we’ve been treating women’s bodies any differently.”
Lushi — named after a rare breed of hen — arranges the entire treatment process, including at-home injections by nurses (“It’s like Uber for nurses,” Schaefer said), 24/7 AI support, on-call doctors and customized wellness plans to optimize fertility. The platform also manages the egg-collection process at a clinic.
All in, a patient can expect to spend around $18,000. Schaefer notes that one round done the right way is cheaper than multiple rounds caused by mis-steps or mistakes.
“For the longest time, fertility companies have been created by doctors — not by marketers, brand builders and people who have access to this network of engineering talent,” Schaefer said.
To retain majority ownership and control of Lushi, she rejected a $5 million private equity investment from an undisclosed firm in favor of smaller seed funding checks from a handful of serial entrepreneurs including Ariel Kaye, founder and CEO of Parachute, and Justin Dibbs, co-founder of Allied Gold Corp .
Her network has also led to conversations with Mark Cuban, an early investor in Cost Plus Drugs, about possible partnerships that could lower the prices of fertility drugs.
Schaefer and her co-founder, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Mana Baskovic, plan to expand into “all areas of women’s health,” including pre- and post-menopause care. They are launching Lushi medical centers and event series in New York and Los Angeles.
Beyond creating the experience she wanted for herself, Schaefer is also bringing her own sensibility to the creation of the company, the app and the brand.
She tapped a longtime New Yorker artist Adam Douglas Thompson to create sketches for the brand and has rolled out timely, playful ad campaigns — like a recent Soho ad buy tying the surging price of chicken eggs to fertility costs.
As President Trump has expressed support for mandating insurance coverage of IVF, Schaefer is hoping he’ll push it even further.
“We’re working with the new administration,” Schaefer says. “President Trump has been a champion of fertility. We’d like him to take it one step further and include egg freezing, which is currently considered elective.” Lushi is currently providing comments to the White House on a possible IVF Executive Order.
She even has her eye on a potential Trump team ally.
“I would love Elon to invest,” Schaefer said of the pro-natalist billionaire. “We’re working on it.”
