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Mate Fertility, the new Los Angeles startup launching today with $2.8 million in financing, has a mission to create a more inclusive network of family planning services for people struggling with the high cost and low availability of fertility clinics around the country.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Oliver Bogner and his brother Gabriel, Mate was born from both brothers’ struggles with trying to start a family. For Oliver, that was when he and his partner were looking at IVF as a way to screen for the BRCA1 gene from her embryos after she found out that she was a carrier. Meanwhile, Gabriel, an IVF baby who is a member of the LGBTQ community, felt that the services for family planning weren’t always accepting of the gay community.
“IVF and surrogacy were the only options for me to have kids,” the younger Bogner said. “And the queer community has been locked out of these services. It became my mission to democratize healthcare for my community.”
Once Oliver started doing research into the market and discovered that there were only 460 fertility clinics in the U.S. and that over 80% were concentrated in five major metropolitan areas, he knew there was an opportunity for a new business.
Mate Fertility co-founders Gabriel and Oliver Bogner. Image Credit: Mate Fertility
The Bogner brothers enlisted famed reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, who trained under the British doctors that pioneered In Vitro Fertilization, to come on board and together the three men launched Mate Fertility.
The co-founders have enlisted an impressive array of financiers to back their business boasting an investor base that includes Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos; Peter Pham, the co-founder of the LA-based consumer focused company incubator, Science; Patrick Schwarzenegger; Brian Schwartz; the investors behind Roman, Allbirds, and Caspar, Rosecliff Ventures; Pure Imagination Brands; Mana Ventures, and Maschmeyer Group Ventures.
Mate is launching first in Oklahoma City, where two legacy providers are charging anywhere from 10% to 15% above the national average for family planning services. “We’re going in at anywhere from 50% to 60% lower costs than they are,” said Oliver Bogner.
The company said it would offer egg freezing services for as low as $5,000 and IVF for $8,000, while the national average for IVF cycle costs ranges from $15,000 to $18,000, including medication.
“We’re still making healthy margins that allow us to operate the business. It’s not a matter fo these procedures costing more. These 460 clinics are allowed to radically mark up the process,” said the elder Bogner. “One of these clinics is making approximately 1,000% profit margin on every procedure.”
Given the fact that the company estimates roughly 18% of the U.S. population will face some fertility issue, the need for more clinics — setting aside the lower costs — would be enormous.
“We need 3,000 clinics to properly serve our population, today we have 460. There’s a huge gap in care,” said Bogner.
The company is working with the architects behind Dry Bar, Heitler Houstoun, to design its clinics in an effort to popularize and destigmatize the services.
“We were really intrigued by Oliver and Gabe. In terms of what the biggest risks are… you’re not playing around. You’re not creating software, you’re creating life,” said Adam Struck, the founder of Mate Fertility’s lead investment firm, Struck Capital. “The ultimate KPI which is success rate for our patients is top tier. There’s a lot that Nate is doing to ensure that some of the best medical personnel in the world are part of the Mate mission.”
Mate Fertility offers modern EHR platforms, an e-pharmacy, proven protocols, payment assistance and digital patient and provider portals for services that include IVF, genetic screening, egg freezing, surrogacy and LGBTQ family building treatments, the company said.
Its first locations will be clinics in Oklahoma City, Anchorage, Ark., Bakersfield, Calif. Lancaster, Pa., Austin, and Portland.
Although the popular audio chat platform Clubhouse today includes a way to share your upcoming hangouts and events across social media, the resulting link that displays is fairly boring. A new link-sharing tool called ClubLink can help. The tool allows hosts to better promote their events by offering a more customized social media preview featuring a photo that includes the room name, who’s attending, the date and time (using the host’s time zone), and even profile icons of the hosts themselves.
The tool was built by two Germany-based colleagues, online marketer Jens Polomski and coder and digital marketer, Peter Thaleikis.
Polomski says he came up with the idea last month because he kept seeing Clubhouse links shared on Twitter and thought they just didn’t look that good.
“I noticed many people share — especially on Twitter — because Clubhouse has this built-in sharing feature,” he says. “But the preview image is not well-optimized and lacks any relevant information.”
Polomski reached out to Thaleikis and convinced him to help build a better version.
Their resulting ClubLink tool is simple to use. You just paste in your Clubhouse event link on the ClubLink website, and it automatically generates the ClubLink you can use. It’s a similar process as to how URL shorteners like tinyurl.com work, for example.
Image Credits: ClubLink
In ClubLink’s case, though, it’s doing a bit more than just returning a shorter URL. The tool visits the Clubhouse link provided and takes a screenshot to help create the image — but it’s not scraping data from Clubhouse, Polomski says. The tool also renames the image file it creates to include the host’s name for better discoverability and, perhaps, for better search engine optimization in the future.
In fact, the SEO aspects of the ClubLink URLs were considered when the tool was built, given its creators have digital marketing backgrounds.
“We’re taking care that the technical SEO background from the links are as good as possible — and that’s something Clubhouse, right now, didn’t do,” notes Polomski. However, he notes that it’s too soon to tell how well those efforts have paid off, as the first ClubLink URLs were just launched last week and only a few have been indexed by Google so far.
After you’ve created the link on the ClubLink website, you’re directed to a page where you have the option to immediately share it out to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Being able to publicize your rooms in advance is a important way to build a following on the audio-based social network, so likely many hosts will begin to put this new tool to use in the days ahead.
Here’s one example of a ClubLink in action:
THIS FRIDAY ON CLUBHOUSE…
Geekout Weekly
Join me + friends to discuss ALL the week's biggest social media news, updates, and platform features
More info: https://t.co/82nkYItqAk
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) February 9, 2021
Of course, sharing a link while you’re in a room is useful too — especially if you’ve landed in a great room you think others should know about. Clubhouse, in its most recent update, noted that you’re now able to click the “+” sign while in room to get a link that you can post to social media. Unfortunately, these “room” links don’t work yet in the ClubLink tool, but the team said they’re already discussing a solution for that.
ClubLink is one of now several small tools that’s popped up in recent days to offer expanded functionality and new features for Clubhouse power users.
We’ve also come across the Clubhouse Bio Creator at clubhousebio.xyz, which helps people perfect their profile bio on the desktop then copy it over to Clubhouse on their phone. Other popular tools help users make their profile picture stand out, like Clubhouse Glow, Clubhouse Avatar Maker, and Thriveepic‘s Canva template.
Last year, in the midst of a particularly spiky U.S. presidential election campaign, a startup called Sentropy emerged from stealth with an AI-based platform aimed at social media and other companies that corralled people together for online conversation.
Sentropy had built a set of algorithms, using natural language processing and machine learning, to help these platforms detect when abusive language, harassing tendencies, and other harmful content was coming around the bend, and to act on those situations before they became an issue.
Today, the startup is unveiling a new product, now aimed at consumers.
Using the same technology that it originally built for enterprise platform, Sentropy Protect is a free consumer product that detects harmful content on a person’s social media feed and, by way of a dashboard, lets a person have better control over how that content and the people producing it are handled.
Starting initially with Twitter, the plan is to add more social feeds over time, based initially on which services provide APIs to let Sentropy integrate with them. (Not all do.)
Sentropy CEO John Redgrave described the consumer product launch is not a pivot but an expansion of what the company is building.
The idea is that Sentropy will continue to work with enterprise customers — its two products in that department are called Sentropy Detect, which provides API-based access to its abuse detection technologies; and Sentropy Defend, a browser-based interface that enables end-to-end moderation workflows for moderators.
But at the same time, the Protect consumer product will give people an added option — whether or not Sentropy is being used by a particular platform — to take the reins and have more hands-on control over their harassment graph, as it were.
“We always had deep conviction of going after the enterprise as a start, but Sentropy is about more than that,” he said. “Cyber safety has to have both enterprise and consumer components.”
It’s refreshing to hear about startups building services, which potentially affect millions of people, also being cognizant of how individuals themselves want to keep an element of self-determination in the equation.
It’s not just, “well, it’s your choice if you use service X or not”, but a grasp of the concept that when someone chooses to use a service, especially a popular one, there should be and can be more than just a hope that the platform will always be looking out for that user’s best interests, by providing tools to help the user do that, too.
And it’s not a problem that is going away, and that goes not just for the hottest platforms today, which are continuing to look for ways to handle complex content — but also on emerging platforms.
The recent popularity of Clubhouse, for example, highlights not just new frontiers in social platforms, but how, for example, those new models — with Clubhouse based on “rooms” for conversations, and a reliance on audio rather than written text for interactions — are handling issues of harassment and abuse. Some striking examples so far point to the problem being one that definitely needs addressing before it grows any bigger.
Protect is free to use today, and Redgrave said that Sentropy is still working on deciding how and if it will charge for it. One likely scenario will be that Protect might come in freemium tiers: a free and limited product for individuals with “pro” services featuring enhanced tools, and perhaps a tier for companies who are managing accounts on behalf of one or several high-profile individuals.
Of course, services like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube and many others have made a big point over the years — and especially recently — to put in more rules, moderators and automated algorithms to help identify and stop abusive content in its tracks, and to help users report and stop content before it gets to them.
But if you are one of the people who gets targeted regularly, or even occasionally, you know that this is often not enough. Sentropy Protect seems to be built with that mindset in mind, too.
Indeed, Redgrave said that even though the company had consumers on its roadmap all along, its strategy was accelerated after the launch of its enterprise product last year in June.
“We started getting pinged by people saying, I get abused online. How can I get access to your technology?” He recalled that the company realized that the problem was at once bigger and more granular than Sentropy could fix simply by working its way through a list of companies, hoping to win them over as customers, and then successfully integrating its product.
“We had a hard decision to make then,” he recalled. “Do we spend 100% of our time focused on enterprises, or do we take a portion of our team and start to build out something for consumers, too?” It decided to take the latter route.
On the enterprise side, Sentropy is continuing to work with social networks and other kinds of companies that host interactions between people — for example message boards connected to gaming experiences, or dating apps. It’s not publicly disclosing any customer names at the moment, but Redgrave describes them as primarily smaller, fast-growing businesses, as opposed to larger and more legacy platforms.
Sentropy’s VP of product, Dev Bala — who has previously been an academic, and also worked at Facebook, Google and Microsoft — explained that bigger, legacy platforms are not outside of Sentropy’s remit. But more often than not, they are working on bigger trust and safety strategies and have small armies of engineers in-house working on building products.
While larger social networks do bring in third-party technology for certain aspects of their services, those deals will typically take longer to close, even in urgent cases such as around working with online abuse.
“I think abuse and harassment are rapidly evolving to be an existential challenge for the likes of Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and the rest,” Bala said. “These companies will have a 10,000 person organization thinking just about trust and safety, and the world is seeing the ills of not doing that. What’s not as obvious to people on the outside is that they are also taking a portfolio approach, with armies of moderators and a portfolio of technology. Not all is built in house.
“We believe there is value from Sentropy for these bigger guys but also know there are a lot of optics around companies using products like ours. So we see the opportunities of going earlier, in cases where the company in question is not a Facebook, and having a less sophisticated approach.”
As a sign of the changing tides and sentiment in the market. It seems that the tackling of abuse and content is starting to get taken seriously as a business concept. And so Sentropy is not the only company tackling this opportunity.
Two other startups — one called Spectrum Labs, and another called L1ght have also built a sets of AI-based tools aimed at various platforms where conversations are happening to help those platforms detect and better moderate instances of toxicity, harassment and abuse.
Another, Block Party, is also looking to work across different social platforms to give users more control over how toxicity touches them, and has, like Sentropy, focused first on Twitter.
With Protect, after content is detected and flagged, users can set up wider, permanent blocks against specific users (who can also be muted through Protect) or themes, manage filtered words, and monitor content that gets automatically flagged for being potentially abusive, in case you want to override the flags and create “trusted” users. Tweets get labelled when they are snagged by Sentropy by the type of abuse (for example, threat of physical violence, sexual aggression, or identity attacks).
Since it’s based on a machine learning platform, Sentropy then takes all of those signals, including the Tweets that have been flagged, and uses them to teach Protect to identify future content along those same lines. The platform is also monitoring chatter on other platforms all the time, and that too feeds into what it looks for and moderates.
If you’re familiar with Twitter’s own abuse protection, you’ll know that all this takes the situation several steps further than the controls Twitter itself provides.
This is still a version one though. Right now, you don’t see your full timeline through Protect, so essentially it means that you toggle between Protect and whatever Twitter client you are using. Some might find that onerous, although on the other hand Bala noted that a sign of Sentropy’s success is that people will actually let it work in the background and you won’t feel the need to constantly check in.
Redgrave also noted that the service is still exploring how to add in other features, for example the ability also to filter direct messages.
Audi revealed Tuesday the 2022 e-tron Quattro GT and its higher-performing sibling the RS e-tron GT — flagships of the German automaker’s growing electric vehicle portfolio and its first departure from the crossovers and SUVs that have so far dominated the lineup.
The Audi e-tron GT and RS are the third and fourth all-electric vehicles in the company’s U.S. portfolio, followed by the e-tron SUV and e-tron Sportback that debuted in 2019. The Audi Q4 e-tron — another SUV — will be the automaker’s fifth electric vehicle. All of these e-tron models are part of Audi’s plan to launch more than 30 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids by 2025.
“This car is a new, very progressive interpretation of the classical GT,” Marc Lichte, head of Audi design, said in Tuesday’s presentation. “That means proportions like a super sports car, and the usability of a real four seater. And that’s something completely new.”
Image Credits: Audi
The e-tron GT, which goes into production this spring and will hit the U.S. market this summer, packs in the performance and luxury in its sporty package. The base e-tron GT has two motors that produce the equivalent of 469 horsepower — or 522 hp with “overboost” — and can travel an estimated 238 miles on the 93.4-kilowatt battery. Under the European WLTP standard, the e-tron GT range is 298 miles.
The RS e-tron has the same front motor as the entry-level GT, but has a more powerful rear motor. Together, the motors can produce 590 horsepower and up to 637 horsepower with overboost. As a result, the RS e-tron GT can accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.1 seconds and has a 155 mph top track speed, the company said. The RS has an estimated EPA range of 232 miles.
The company has yet to receive an official EPA estimate for either variant.
The vehicles also have an 800-volt electrical architecture — the same that is in the Porsche Taycan. That architecture allows the e-tron GT, like the Taycan, to replenish its battery from 5% to 80% in 22.5 minutes, one of the quickest charging rates in the industry.
The e-tron GT shares more than just the 800-volt electrical architecture with Porsche. Audi and Porsche, which are both VW Group companies, co-developed the e-tron GT and the Taycan. The two vehicles also have the same chassis and J1 EV battery platform.
Inside, the e-tron GT comes standard with a 12.3-inch Audi virtual cockpit digital instrument cluster and a central 10.1-inch touchscreen, where drivers can control music, navigation and other controls as well as electric vehicle-specific features such as searching for charging stations. Owners can opt for an upgrade and add a head-up display as well.
Image Credits: Audi
The vehicle also comes standard in a leather-free interior featuring recycled materials including an artificial suede called Dinamica, although a Nappa leather option is also available as an upgrade.
All of this performance and luxury comes at a price. The base model of the e-tron GT quattro starts at $99,900, followed by a higher trim level priced at $107,100. The RS e-tron GT starts at $139,900. Those prices push even higher for those that opt for the additional features, notably the company’s Matrix LED headlights, which are only available in Europe.
Aerion has been working on ushering in a new era of commercial supersonic flight for nearly a decade now, and the company just revealed that it has signed a new partnership with NASA to put that experience to use in the pursuit of supersonic point-to-point travel – the technical name for putting the kind of high-speed flight typically associated with space launches to use in helping people move very quickly from one place on Earth to another.
The new collaboration comes via the Space Act Agreement, which basically allows NASA to enlist the aid of private companies to help it achieve its various goals. NASA has been developing high-Mach, supersonic aircraft technologies for some time now, in particular though its arrangement with Lockheed Martin to build and fly the X-59 QueSST, a demonstrator aircraft that will show how supersonic craft can also operate relatively quietly, with so-called ‘low-boom’ capabilities that avoid the loud sonic booms produced by most supersonic vehicles when they break the sound barrier.
NASA announced a similar partnership under the Space Act Agreement with Virgin Galactic last year, with the goal of helping the agency develop technologies that will assist in the eventual deployment of sustainable supersonic commercial flight. Aerion’s team-up with the agency will focus specifically on studying commercial flight capabilities in speeds ranging between Mach 3 and Mach 5, with a focus on propulsion and thermal management systems, power generation and technologies for use in the passenger and crew cabins.
Aerion’s own high-speed commercial aviation efforts are currently on track to see its AS2 private jet for business customers enter production in 2023, which will set the stage for its AS3 commercial supersonic passenger aircraft to follow after that.
This isn’t Aerion’s first team-up with NASA: The two have collaborated twice previously on similar projects, with the first collaboration begun way back in 2012. Now that Aerion’s closer to actual production, it’s likely that both partners will gain a lot towards their mutual goals of helping the U.S. develop commercially viable and sustainable supersonic passenger flight technologies.
