Many people who want to have children can’t, or shouldn’t, carry a pregnancy for a variety of reasons. Gestational surrogacy can be a great option for those individuals — if they can endure the lengthy wait times and afford to pay for the costly service. New York-based Nodal looks to make the process less expensive, more transparent, and faster.
Nodal is a marketplace for prospective parents to get matched with vetted surrogates. Nodal founder and CEO Dr. Brian Levine told TechCrunch that his company wants to fix the industry’s supply-and-demand problems.
Nodal takes the same technology-driven approach as life insurance companies to vet potential surrogates, Levine said, which speeds up the process and allows for more surrogates to be available. The marketplace approach also provides transparency for parents to have more control over which surrogate they work with. Nodal also cuts out middleman costs and works with fertility benefit companies like Carrot, Maven, and Progyny to lower the costs for prospective parents.
Levine said Nodal is designed to help lower costs, even for people who are paying out of pocket. Users pay a $500 monthly fee until they find a match. Facilitating the match is $15,000, and those monthly payments chip away at that total.
If users want Nodal to serve as a case manager, those services start at an additional $10,000. While still expensive, Levine said prior to launching Nodal, his patients were spending up to $180,000 for all of this. “We .