'People Thought It Was Insane': How Startup Gameto Is Turning Women's Health Sci-Fi Into Reality

CEO Dina Radenkovic Turner has raised $127 million to date for a startup that's already helped with 9 births, and has bigger plans to take on menopause and ovarian health.

Gameto cofounder Dina Radenkovic Turner says it’s “graduation time” for her startup. Credit: Gameto

The Upstart

When Dina Radenkovic Turner logs extra hours for her startup, she thinks about her daughter.

That’s been more often recently, as the founder and CEO of Gameto guided her women’s health startup through a major fundraise, ongoing Phase 3 trials of its IVF-related treatment, and has carried her pregnancy to term – with that daughter, her second child, due any day now.

“I want to look my baby girl in the eyes and know I helped her to have more similar opportunities to her older brother,” Radenkovic Turner says. “I want us to allow her optionality, so she can make decisions as life happens.”

The first way Gameto plans to do that is through Fertilo, a treatment that retrieves eggs from a patient and matures them outside of the body. The startup believes its process can reduce an otherwise painful and more expensive process of several weeks of hormone injections into a three day, more effective experience.

The science comes from a Harvard lab associated with ‘Jurassic Park’, but it’s already helped to produce nine healthy births in countries where Fertilo is already approved, including Australia and Peru. One patient in the U.S. clinical trial, expected to continue through next year, is already pregnant, the company says.

And that’s enough for Radenkovic Turner to have spurned acquisition interest this summer to instead raise $44 million in a Series C funding round led by Overwater Ventures – a rare instance of a pregnant VC firm founder leading a large check into a startup led by a pregnant founder.

With $127 million raised so far overall, Radenkovic Turner, cofounder Martin Varsavky and chief scientific officer Christian Kramme have bigger ambitions to establish a wider-ranging therapeutics company, with additional treatments intended to take on menopause and ovarian disease.

“We’re trying to build out a biopharma category,” Radenkovic Turner says. “And this is graduation time.”

More on what Gameto’s building – and the Upstart founders behind its sci-fi worthy approach – in our exclusive deep dive.