Raffaele Mauro

Gameto my sixth unicorn was just sold to Ferring for $1.38bn here is the story. In 2020 I endowed a fellowship at Harvard in my father's name, Carlos M. Varsavsky, in the lab of George Church, one of the world's leading geneticists. Its goal: to make human eggs in the lab. Gameto grew out of it. My father was an astrophysicist and built the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía, Argentina's radio astronomy institute. He was a great teacher, at the university and at home. In a time without artificial intelligence, he was the artificial intelligence for me: he knew about everything. He died young. The fellowship carries his name. The fellowship paid for the PhD of Christian Kramme, a Californian geneticist who worked out how to make in the lab the cells that surround an egg in the ovary and help it mature. He is now Gameto's chief scientific officer. Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the Swiss fertility drug maker, is acquiring Gameto for up to $1.3825 billion. I am a co-founder, and this is the story of a company that set out to do one thing and was bought for another. I came to fertility in 2016 with Prelude Fertility, a network of US clinics I built, now part of Inception, the largest fertility network in North America. Inside those clinics I learned that IVF works, but it is brutal. For two weeks a woman injects herself with hormones so her ovaries release many eggs at once: around 28 shots, ultrasounds, blood tests, bloating and mood swings. Many women go through it once and never again. Every one who stops is a pregnancy that never happens. One question obsessed me: what if the treatment took three days instead of two weeks. I brought in Dina Radenkovic Turner as co-founder and CEO. She was 26, a physician trained at University College London and one of the brightest people I have ever worked with. Many questioned the bet on someone that young. Time proved us right. I had a moonshot and a fellowship. Dina turned them into a company. She looked at Christian's cells and saw a product: if the egg was out of reach, we would do the ovary's work in the lab. That became Fertilo. With Fertilo a woman takes hormones for two or three days, about 80% fewer shots. Her eggs are collected immature and spend a day in the lab with those cells, which do the ovary's job. Then they are fertilized as in any IVF cycle. The cells never enter her body. On December 16, 2024, the first baby conceived this way was born in Lima. By August there were five babies and more than twenty pregnancies. Three gentle cycles beat one brutal cycle nobody wants to repeat. With Dina at the helm, Gameto raised about $127 million in total from Overwater Ventures, Insight Partners, RA Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, BOLD Capital Partners, Future Ventures, Olivia Walton's Ingeborg Investments, Arcadia Investment Partners, PAGS Group, Pontiva Healthcare Partners and Portfolia, and from Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, Bob Nelsen of ARCH Venture Partners, Stacey Bendet Eisner of Alice + Olivia and Chelsea Hirschhorn of Frida. Gameto is the sixth company I have built to pass a billion dollars, after Viatel, Yacom, Jazztel, Eolia Renovables, sold in 2017, and Inception/Prelude Fertility, Telecoms, internet, clean energy, clinics, biotech: nothing in common, and in every one the team mattered more than me.