What

Future Family is a digital health and fintech platform financing clients’ plans to start families and keep them healthy. While initially the company started as a financing partner for fertility clinics, helping around 3,000 people start their families, it’s now expanding to provide a comprehensive employee benefit that covers a wider range of procedures and needs. It will provide financial care to cover processes like IVF and gestational surrogacy as well as high out-of-pocket procedures like those following a cancer diagnosis. 

Why

Future Family first grew its business through a fertility clinic partner model because almost 50% of patients don’t return to a clinic after an initial conversation because of high costs, highlighting the massive individual financial gap affecting reproductive rights. “Future Family really fills that gap,” said Amanda Devlin, Vice President of Enterprise at Future Family. “We are a financing partner for these clinics to be able to offer their patients an option and a treatment plan to move forward with.”

Devlin added that, in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, HR business leaders have leaned into reproductive care as an employee benefit. “They're really wanting to offer their employees a benefit that's pretty inclusive, and allows them to follow their own journey or path,” she said. 

Future Family also decided to expand the range of benefits it offers in order to support families beyond the initial stages. The company also identified another gap in the market—a lack of financial assistance to cover ongoing health needs that complement fertility care. 

How

Other timing-related questions—not just a changing reproductive-rights landscape—affect how Future Family now sells its employee benefit to businesses. Crucially, the benefit can roll out at any time, not just during open enrollment periods. To Devlin, this means businesses can use the benefit as an employee retention incentive at any time, while also shortening sales cycles. 

While Future Family is committing resources to this new B2B model, the company still identifies clinic partners as crucial sales and growth leads. Clinics continue to refer patients to Future Family, and, in turn, Future Family provides network navigation capabilities to businesses’ employees that can help them find care through one of Future Family’s clinic partners. “We're not dictating where employees get care or what that journey looks like,” Devlin clarified. “A lot of other benefits that are out there will provide you with the list of clinics that you can go to, providers that you can see.”

Future Family eyes high-growth startups and SMBs as their target sales audience for this new offering. Larger organizations already have many of the benefits Future Family provides, while smaller employers explicitly look for benefits that are affordable and require little up-front cost. As such, pricing and cash flow benefits present a sales opportunity for Future Family, as $500-per-month contributions are friendlier to employers’ balance sheets than footing a $20,000 medical cost up front. “But what's been surprising is that it's not just your small startups but also pretty large companies that find this very attractive as well,” Devlin commented. 

In addition to a new inbound sales-generating website, Future Family looks to provide a more comprehensive suite of benefits falling under its financing purview. “We really want to make sure that we don't only meet the needs, but we exceed the needs of employees in the market,” Devlin said. “So we have a lot of internal work that we're doing to continue to enhance this.”