Nelson Advisors: Fertifa Acquires Tuune: What the Deal Means for Workplace Women's Health
Fertifa, the London healthtech run by venture capitalist Eileen Burbidge, has agreed to buy Tuune, a women's health company whose regulated clinical software helps clinicians deliver personalised hormonal care. The deal, first reported by Sky News, is expected to be announced this week. Its value is not being disclosed.
On its face it is a small transaction between two private UK companies. But it says a great deal about where workplace health benefits are heading. Fertifa began life in 2019 as a fertility benefits specialist, helping employers fund IVF and egg freezing for staff. It has since broadened into mental health, neurodiversity, weight management and infant care. Tuune brings something the company has wanted for a while: a clinically rigorous, regulated engine for contraception and menopause, two areas of women's health that affect far more employees than fertility treatment ever will.
The acquisition also lands at a moment when large employers are under growing pressure to take women's health seriously. Menopause alone pushes hundreds of thousands of experienced women out of the UK workforce every year, and employers are increasingly being measured on what they do about it. That demand, and the gap between what companies promise and what they actually deliver, is the real story behind this deal.
This post looks at who the two companies are, why Fertifa wants Tuune, what the combination could mean for employees and HR teams, and the questions that remain open.
Who is Fertifa?
Fertifa was founded in August 2019 by Tony Chen and Nick Kuan with a simple pitch: fertility treatment is expensive, NHS provision is patchy and varies by postcode, and employers could close the gap by offering fertility support as a workplace benefit. The company's name is a contraction of its mission, "fertility for all".
The early product was essentially a digital fertility clinic for employees. Staff at participating companies could access clinical advice, telehealth consultations and employer-funded allowances for treatments such as IVF, IUI, ICSI and egg, embryo or sperm freezing. Fertifa handled the reimbursement administration, checked eligibility and wrote and fulfilled prescriptions through an in-house clinical team.
The company's trajectory changed in January 2022 when Eileen Burbidge stepped in as executive director. Burbidge is a founding partner of Passion Capital, the London seed fund that led Fertifa's pre-seed round, and has sat on the boards of Monzo, Marshmallow and Butternut Box. She was awarded an MBE in 2015 and has served as the UK government's special envoy for fintech. Fortune once described her as the queen of British venture capital. She took the operating role at Fertifa rather than a board seat, and has been open about her own reasons: multiple reproductive health journeys across her career, including three rounds of IVF, miscarriages and, more recently, perimenopause.
Under Burbidge, Fertifa has grown from a fertility specialist into what it now calls a reproductive, hormonal and sexual health benefits platform. By mid-2023 its services already covered contraception, surrogacy, adoption, menopause, endometriosis, PCOS, fibroids, STIs and men's sexual health. In June 2023 it raised a £5 million seed round led by Notion Capital and Triple Point Ventures, with EQT Foundation, Speedinvest, Passion Capital and a long list of angels participating. At that point the company said revenue had grown tenfold in a year and that it had channelled more than £1.5 million of employer-funded reimbursements to patients.
Its client list reads like a who's who of consumer brands. Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been a customer, alongside Sony Music, H&M, Lululemon, Space NK, Virgin Group and Bain Capital. Fertifa is also the exclusive provider of Aviva UK's family planning and fertility benefit across many of the insurer's healthcare schemes, which gives it distribution well beyond its own direct sales.
The Tuune deal is not Fertifa's first acquisition. In July 2025 it bought Juniper, a two-year-old London company providing reproductive health insurance, a move that extended Fertifa from benefits administration into insured products. Taken together, the two deals show a company assembling, piece by piece, a full-stack women's and reproductive health platform for the European employer market.
Who is Tuune?
Tuune is a London femtech company founded in 2018 that builds clinical decision support software for hormonal health. Where Fertifa is a benefits platform with a clinical team attached, Tuune is a technology company at heart. Its product takes a woman's medical history, lifestyle and reported symptoms, runs them through a clinically validated model, and helps a clinician choose the most suitable hormonal treatment.
The company was co-founded by Shardi Nahavandi, whose own story shaped the product. After being misdiagnosed with cancer and repeatedly dismissed by doctors, she left her job and took two health degrees before working out that her illness was rooted in a hormonal imbalance. Tuune's founding premise is that this experience is common: hormones sit behind a huge range of conditions, from PCOS and endometriosis to anxiety, acne and weight gain, yet most women get a few minutes with a GP and a default prescription.
Tuune's first product was contraception. The system assesses a patient's full profile and recommends the hormonal contraceptive most likely to suit her, rather than the one a clinic happens to stock. In October 2021 the company raised $4.6 million in a round led by Octopus Ventures to launch in the United States, and it has been backed by Google for Startups. The company's own research at the time claimed that more than half of women experience side effects from their contraception and that most feel their doctor does not spend enough time finding the right one.
Since then Tuune has extended the same engine to menopause. According to Sky News, its technology now assesses more than 70 symptoms alongside an individual's medical history to support clinical decisions across both contraception and menopause. That is the part Fertifa is buying. Perimenopause and menopause present with a bewildering spread of symptoms, from hot flushes and sleep disturbance to anxiety, joint pain and brain fog, and many are routinely misattributed to stress or depression. A structured, evidence-based assessment that captures all of them is exactly what busy clinicians and confused patients lack.
Two features of Tuune matter for what comes next. The first is that its software is regulated as a clinical product, which means it has been through the evidence and safety scrutiny that a wellness app has not. The second is that it is small. Public listings put the team at between 10 and 20 people, which suggests the deal is less about buying a book of customers and more about buying technology, clinical IP and a team that has spent six years on a hard problem.
The strategic logic: from fertility niche to whole-life platform
Fertility benefits are a brilliant wedge and a limited market. Roughly one in seven UK couples has difficulty conceiving, and IVF is costly enough that an employer-funded allowance is a life-changing perk for the people who need it. But at any given moment only a small fraction of a workforce is trying for a baby. A benefit used by two or three per cent of staff is easy for a finance director to cut when budgets tighten.
Burbidge has said from the start that Fertifa's biggest competitor is employer inaction, not rival platforms. The way to beat inaction is to make the benefit relevant to as many employees as possible, for as much of their working lives as possible. That is the thread connecting every move the company has made since 2022: contraception for people in their twenties, fertility and family-forming in their thirties, menopause in their forties and fifties, plus men's sexual health, mental health, neurodiversity, weight management and infant care along the way. Burbidge has argued publicly that for many employees this kind of support is more relevant than a pension.
Seen that way, Tuune fills the two largest gaps in the life-stage map. Contraception touches most women of working age at some point. Menopause touches every woman who lives long enough, typically around the age of 51 in the UK, which is precisely when many are at the peak of their careers. Between them, these two areas cover a far larger share of a workforce, for far longer, than fertility treatment does.
There is also a quality argument. Fertifa has always positioned itself against lighter-touch competitors by stressing its clinical depth: an in-house medical team, prescription writing, eligibility checking. As the company has broadened into new areas, keeping that depth consistent becomes harder. Menopause care in particular is an area where the market is flooded with content, coaching and webinars but short on rigorous clinical assessment. Owning a regulated decision-support tool lets Fertifa offer something substantively different from a menopause awareness session.
Finally, there is the build-versus-buy calculation. Developing regulated clinical software from scratch takes years and specialist expertise. Buying a company that has already done it, and already extended the engine from contraception into menopause, lets Fertifa add the capability now rather than in 2029. For a business trying to establish itself as the category leader in Europe before a US player arrives in force, speed matters.
The menopause gap in the workplace
Menopause is the most under-served health event in working life, and the numbers have been clear for years. The largest UK survey of menopausal women, 4,014 respondents aged 45 to 55 polled for a Channel 4 documentary with the Fawcett Society in 2022, found that one in ten women who worked through the menopause had left a job because of their symptoms. Mapped onto the UK population, that is roughly 333,000 women. A further 14 per cent had cut their hours, 14 per cent had gone part-time and 8 per cent had not applied for a promotion.
The cost to employers is not just attrition. These are typically women in their late forties and early fifties with two or three decades of experience, often in senior roles, and they are expensive to replace. A separate survey of 2,000 women aged 45 to 67 found that nearly a fifth were considering leaving their jobs, that a quarter were unhappy at work because of a lack of support, and that women ranked menopause as the second most damaging event in their careers after having children. Almost two thirds said their employer had no menopause policy at all.
The healthcare side is just as patchy. In the Fawcett research, 45 per cent of women had never discussed menopause with their GP practice. Among those who had, nearly a third said it took several appointments before anyone recognised what was happening, and only 39 per cent were offered hormone replacement therapy once they were diagnosed. Women of colour and women with the most severe symptoms were the most likely to be missed. A poll of 3,800 women presented to the Royal College of GPs found that 60 per cent had no menopause support at work and that where women were signed off sick, the certificate was far more likely to say anxiety or stress than menopause.
That is the gap. Awareness has improved enormously since 2022, helped by high-profile campaigners, a government taskforce and a wave of corporate menopause policies. But a policy is a document. What most workplaces still lack is a route from a struggling employee to an accurate clinical assessment and, where appropriate, treatment, without a six-week wait and three GP appointments. Employers that have bought menopause benefits have often ended up with education and peer support rather than clinical care.
That is precisely the territory Tuune's technology addresses. A 70-symptom structured assessment, combined with medical history and delivered through a regulated tool, is a way to turn a vague cluster of complaints into a clinical picture a prescriber can act on. Plugged into Fertifa's existing clinical team and employer distribution, it could shorten the journey from first symptom to appropriate care from months to days.
Why employers are buying reproductive and sexual health benefits
Five years ago, fertility benefits in the UK were a Silicon Valley import, offered by Apple, Facebook and LinkedIn to their London staff and by almost nobody else. Today they are a mainstream line in the benefits budgets of banks, retailers, law firms and consumer brands. Several forces explain the shift, and all of them point in Fertifa's direction.
The first is talent. Employers compete for women, and women notice which companies treat reproductive health as a normal part of working life rather than an awkward private matter. Burbidge has observed that corporates often act once they see a competitor for talent do so first. A fertility or menopause benefit has become a signal, in the same way that enhanced parental leave was a decade ago.
The second is retention economics. Replacing a senior employee can cost a large multiple of her salary once recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity are counted. Against that, a per-employee-per-month subscription to a women's health platform is cheap. The menopause attrition figures above make the business case almost arithmetical: if a benefit keeps even a handful of experienced women from leaving, it has paid for itself.
The third is the NHS. Waiting times, variable access to IVF by postcode and the difficulty of getting a timely menopause consultation have pushed more care into the private sector. Employers have become the natural payer, because they are the only institution with both an interest in the outcome and the scale to negotiate. Fertifa's partnership with Aviva shows how the employer, the insurer and the benefits platform are converging on the same proposition.
The fourth is inclusion. Reproductive benefits that cover surrogacy, adoption, donor conception and LGBTQ+ family building have become a visible test of whether a company's inclusion commitments are real. Fertifa has made equity of access, regardless of gender, sexuality or relationship status, part of its pitch from the beginning.
The fifth, and newest, is the broadening definition of wellbeing. Mental health, neurodiversity and weight management have each become benefits categories in their own right. Employers do not want ten vendors. They want one platform that covers the whole person, with one contract, one app and one set of utilisation reports. That is why Fertifa has diversified so aggressively, and why owning a clinically credible hormonal health capability matters: it keeps the platform coherent as it grows.
The demand is real, then, but it is also discerning. HR directors who bought the first wave of wellbeing apps have learned to ask whether a benefit delivers clinical outcomes or just content. Tuune's regulatory status and structured assessment are an answer to that question.
What personalised hormonal care looks like in practice
The phrase "personalised hormonal healthcare" is easy to say and hard to deliver. It helps to be concrete about what changes for an employee once a tool like Tuune's sits inside a benefit like Fertifa's.
Consider a 48-year-old marketing director. For a year she has slept badly, felt anxious in meetings she used to run, put on weight and lost the thread mid-sentence often enough to worry about it. Her GP, in an eight-minute appointment, suggested stress and offered antidepressants. Under the old model, her employer's menopause policy entitled her to a flexible working conversation and a link to a webinar.
Under the new model, she opens her employer's health benefit app and completes a structured assessment. It asks about all of her symptoms, not just the ones she thought were relevant, and about her medical and family history, her contraception, her periods and her lifestyle. The software scores the pattern against clinical evidence and flags that her profile is consistent with perimenopause, while also checking for contraindications and other conditions that could present similarly. Within days she has a video consultation with a clinician who already has the full picture in front of her. If HRT is appropriate, a prescription is issued and fulfilled; if not, the clinician can discuss alternatives with the same evidence base. Follow-up assessments track whether the treatment is working.
Now consider a 29-year-old analyst who has tried three contraceptive pills, each of which gave her side effects, and has quietly stopped using any. Tuune's original product was built for her: the same assessment logic, applied to contraception, recommends the formulation most likely to suit her hormones and history rather than the default. Fertifa's clinical team can prescribe it.
Two things make this different from a symptom checker. First, the software is regulated, so its recommendations have been validated and it is designed to support a clinician, not replace one. Second, it sits inside a benefit that includes the clinician, the prescription and the employer funding, so the assessment leads somewhere. Most digital health tools fail at exactly that handoff: they tell you something is wrong and then leave you to join the queue.
For HR teams, the model also produces something they rarely get from wellbeing benefits: measurable outcomes. Utilisation, time to treatment and symptom improvement can all be reported, anonymised, back to the employer. That turns a menopause benefit from a gesture into a line that can justify its own budget.
The competitive landscape and what the deal signals
The employer women's health market has two tiers. At the top are the American giants: Maven Clinic, Progyny and Kindbody, each valued at over a billion dollars at their peak, and Carrot, which has sold global fertility benefits since its Y Combinator days. Below them is a fragmented layer of European and UK specialists, most of them focused on a single life stage or condition. Peppy built a business on menopause, fertility and early parenthood support; a long tail of menopause clinics, apps and coaching services sells directly to employers.
When Fertifa raised its seed round in 2023, Notion Capital's Itxaso del Palacio made the investment thesis explicit: Europe spends far more on assisted reproduction than the United States yet had produced no unicorn in the category, while the US had three. The bet was that a European consolidator could emerge before the Americans crossed the Atlantic in force.
Consolidation has been happening since. Progyny bought Apryl, a Berlin fertility benefits platform, in June 2024. Fertifa bought Juniper in 2025. And in the wider femtech market, capital has continued to flow to companies with clinical substance: Ferring agreed in late October 2026 to buy fertility biotech Gameto for $1.38 billion, and UK startups such as Unravel Health have raised money for at-home hormone testing. Investors have become more selective about wellness content and more enthusiastic about regulated diagnostics and decision support.
Tuune sits on the right side of that line, which is probably why Fertifa wanted it and why a larger player might have, too. For Fertifa, the acquisition does three things competitively. It makes the platform harder to pick apart, because a rival menopause specialist can no longer claim that Fertifa only does fertility. It raises the clinical bar in contraception and menopause, where much of the competition is content-led. And it gives Fertifa a piece of intellectual property that would be hard for a US entrant to replicate quickly in a UK regulatory context.
The deal also tells us something about Tuune's path. A venture-backed company that raised to enter the US in 2021 and is being acquired for an undisclosed sum in 2026 has most likely found that selling regulated clinical software directly to consumers, or even to clinics, is a slow road. The employer channel, where Fertifa already has the relationships and the clinical team, offers a faster route to scale for the technology than Tuune could build alone. For a small team that has spent years on validation, that can be a better outcome than another funding round.
It is worth being careful about what the deal is not. It is not, on the available evidence, a large transaction. Fertifa's total disclosed funding is around £6 million, and Tuune's team is small. This is a strategic tuck-in by a well-connected company with a clear roadmap, not a blockbuster. Its significance lies in the direction it confirms rather than the size of the cheque.
Open questions and risks
A sensible reader should hold a few questions open until the formal announcement and, more importantly, until the integration is visible to customers.
Will Tuune's software stay a product in its own right? Tuune launched in the United States and has had direct and clinical customers of its own. Fertifa has not said whether it will keep selling the software outside its benefits platform, fold it entirely into the Fertifa app, or do both. Existing Tuune users will want to know what happens to their data and their service.
Can a benefits company sustain a regulated software product? Clinical decision support software carries ongoing obligations: post-market surveillance, evidence updates, regulatory change. These require specialist people and a culture of clinical governance that is different from selling benefits to HR teams. Keeping Tuune's team intact and resourced is the single most important integration task.
Breadth versus depth. Fertifa now spans fertility, contraception, menopause, men's health, mental health, neurodiversity, weight management and infant care. Every expansion is defensible on its own; together they stretch a company of modest size thinly. Employers buying a platform this broad will reasonably ask whether each area is as deep as the fertility service that built Fertifa's reputation.
Privacy and employer visibility. Hormonal health data is among the most sensitive information an employee has. Reproductive choices, contraception, menopause and mental health are all areas where a worker may not want any signal reaching their employer. Fertifa's model already depends on anonymised reporting, but as the data it holds becomes richer, the governance has to become correspondingly stricter, and it has to be communicated clearly to the people using the benefit.
The economics of access. A benefit is only equitable if it reaches the employees who need it most. Menopause attrition is highest among disabled women and those with the most severe symptoms; GP recognition is worst for women of colour. If a clinical assessment tool is deployed only to the head-office staff of consumer brands, it will help the people who were already best placed to get help. The larger social value of this deal depends on reaching lower-paid, shift-based and frontline workforces, which is a harder commercial sell.
Regulatory and political weather. Burbidge has spoken about the erosion of reproductive health access and the strains on the NHS as reasons to build Fertifa. Those same forces could cut both ways: greater demand for private, employer-funded care, but also increased scrutiny of private fertility and hormone services, which has already been growing in the UK.
None of these is a reason to doubt the logic of the deal. They are the questions on which its success will be judged in two or three years.
Conclusion: a small deal that points at a large shift
Fertifa's purchase of Tuune will not make headlines for its price. It should make them for what it represents. A company that began by helping employers pay for IVF is now assembling clinically regulated capability across the whole arc of women's hormonal health, from a first contraceptive prescription at 20 to menopause care at 50, and selling it to the employers of hundreds of thousands of people.
The demand side is not in doubt. One in ten women has left a job because of menopause symptoms; most workplaces still have no real clinical route for them; and the GP pathway misses many of the women who need it most. Employers have grasped that this is a retention problem with a measurable cost, and they are increasingly willing to pay for a solution that goes beyond awareness. The supply side has lagged, because the hard part, rigorous, personalised clinical assessment delivered at scale, is hard. Tuune spent six years on exactly that problem. Fertifa has the distribution, the clinical team and the funding partners to put the result in front of employees.
If the integration is done well, the combination could set a new baseline for what a workplace women's health benefit is supposed to include: not a policy and a webinar, but an assessment, a clinician and a treatment plan. If it is done badly, it will be one more wellbeing feature in an app that already has too many.
For HR and benefits leaders, the practical takeaway is simple. The bar has moved.
When a vendor offers a menopause or contraception benefit, ask whether it includes a regulated clinical assessment and a prescribing clinician, how fast an employee gets from first symptom to treatment, and what outcome data comes back. Those are the questions Fertifa is betting it can now answer better than anyone else in Europe.
Nelson Advisors > European Healthcare Technology Investment Banking
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