Building a family looks different for everyone. For Westporter Carmela Rae and her husband Geoffrey Lynch, it was not an easy road. After meeting Geoffrey in her late 30s, Carmela endured a series of miscarriages, followed by years of IVF treatments, and an attempt to conceive via egg donation that, unfortunately, did not work out. “You never know what’s going to happen to you in this process,” Carmela tells Westport Lifestyle. “There are rugs that get pulled out from under you in so many directions.” After years of challenges, Carmela recalls Geoffrey saying: “Look, I want to have a family, but not at the risk of losing you to get it.’ He really gave me permission to stop and think about whether this was something I wanted to continue to put myself through emotionally, physically, and financially.” While it might sound less significant, the financial part of fertility treatments is no small thing—Carmela says they had spent about $80,000 of their savings on trying to have a child up to that point. “After we decided to stop trying, I thought to myself: what is the rest of my life going to be about if it’s not going to be about raising a family? What am I going to give back to the world? I decided to create what I wish I’d had, and that’s when the idea for EggFund was born. And that is how Carmela became the founder and CEO of EggFund a fertility financing platform that helps people going through fertility treatments, surrogacy, or adoption access affordable loans.
Carmela didn’t have a traditional background in tech or finance before launching EggFund. Although she holds a BBA in Banking and Finance and worked for the SEC, she left the finance world to pursue her passion for art, enjoying a successful career in the art industry. However, she quickly adapted to the startup scene, gaining acceptance into the Founders Institute Accelerator for startups. Just as she was about to begin, she found out, at 45, that she was pregnant. Their daughter Elizabeth was born in June of 2018, and six months later, EggFund officially launched.
Bringing her daughter and her startup into the world in the same year proved to be exactly the poetic happy ending it sounds like: Elisabeth is thriving in Westport, where her parents moved during the pandemic, and EggFund is now the largest platform for fertility financing. “We basically created the Lending Tree of fertility loans,” explains Carmela. Their goal is to make fertility financing as simple and as cost-effective as possible (think: no dings to your credit score for checking with their lenders to see what you’re preapproved for, no obligations, and stretching the repayment period from the standard five years for unsecured personal loans to sometimes as much as 20 years). “We’re looking for a better solution to save people more money, give them more flexibility, and be responsive to the actual needs of people going through the process,” she says. It helps that the CEO knows the process so well, of course. “When I hear from people, whether it’s when they’re applying with me or after they submit, ‘wow, that was so easy, I wish the rest of the fertility process was like this?’ I feel like I’ve accomplished what I was supposed to do.”
For more information about EggFund, visit myeggfund.com
"What is my life going to be about? What am I going to give back to the world?"
“We’re looking for a better solution to save people more money, give them more flexibility, and be responsive to the actual needs of people going through the process.”