There's a Hot New Egg-Freezing Startup. It's Weirder Than You Could Imagine

It's Weirder Than You Could Imagine Cofertility lets women freeze their eggs for free--as long as they give half of them back to the company. What happens next is anyone's guess. The Instagram post, precision-guided by sex and age, had zeroed in on its target. Yuchen Tu is a conser vatory-trained viola player from Chongqing, China, a lover of science fiction, and an aspiring member of the US Army Reserve Officer Training Corps. And late last spring, just after her 24th birthday, she realized she might be the perfect candidate to freeze her eggs--for free. Tu goes by Sue, a name she likes because it reminds her of the 2024 body horror film, whose protagonist tortures herself in pursuit of youth and beauty. To prequalify for free egg freezing, all Sue had to do was take a two-minute quiz. "Not everyone can pass this exam," she remembers thinking. "Oh, it seems like a competition." Sue passed, as have thousands of young women allured by the promise of a company called Cofertility. "The best time to freeze your eggs is when you can least afford it," goes the company's mantra, uttered on repeat by its public face and CEO, onetime Uber employee Lauren Makler. Thus was born Cofertility's mission: to help women like Sue, who had just received her master's degree in classical music and was preparing to embark on a second bachelor's, preserve their future fertility for zero dollars. Instead of paying to freeze and store her eggs with money--the going rate in New York City, where Sue lives, is about $18,000--she would use a currency she already had in abundance: the eggs themselves. Cofertility's clients must, in the company's words, "donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents that need the help of an egg donor to have a baby." It's a model called egg sharing, and it hadn't been commercialized widely in the US until Cofertility came along.