New Startup Makes Fertility Testing More Accessible

Wake Forest graduate Afton Vechery realized that she kept having the same conversation with many women she knew – many wanting to know more about their own fertility. Based on the conversations she had with them, coupled with her own experience with fertility testing, she was inspired to create the reproductive health startup, Modern Fertility.

The company provides an at-home, affordable fertility test that collects a blood sample through a finger prick. 

The sample is sent to a lab where it's analyzed for up to eight hormones including Anti-mullerian hormone and Estradiol. The user then gets results and explanations back.

The findings can help tell women about their ovarian reserve, at what age they might hit menopause and whether they'd be a good candidate for in vitro fertilization or egg freezing.

Vechery says women are thinking about their fertility even before they try to get pregnant, but they don't have tools to understand it.

“We really started Modern Fertility to make this kind of testing more available to women everywhere," she says. "But also to jumpstart the conversation about fertility and turn something that we really deal with in a reactive way to something that was proactive, that we could plan for over time.”

“When developing the business model and vision for Modern Fertility, our view was that this type of testing should be as routine as getting a pap smear,” Vechery says.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 1 in 10 women deal with issues of infertility.