On this Episode of Why Design, Chris Whyte sits down with Tess Cosad CEO and co-founder of Béa Fertility to talk about what it actually takes to build clinical-grade fertility care that people can use at home.

We go deep on founding during lockdown, navigating a VC landscape where 2% of funding goes to female founders, designing a medical device that nobody thought was possible, and why Béa is already outperforming US revenue forecasts by nearly 100%.

This one’s raw, funny, and genuinely moving. Don’t miss it.

00:00 — Introduction

00:35 — The hospital bed phone call that changed everything

03:32 — Her baby boy is turning one this year

05:30 — From astrophysics to ad agencies: Tess’s founder origin story

10:18 — Founding Béa three days into COVID lockdown

12:07 — The fundraising reality: 283 investors, femtech bias

13:19 — Why Béa is actually a male-factor infertility solution

15:26 — Shame, male partners, and the angry support emails

18:18 — Brand voice, levity, and scrotal cooling puns

22:48 — Investor pushback: “Why are you the person to do this?”

27:26 — The wall of baby photos that doesn’t move the needle

28:07 — The pitch where she was asked about flight schedules

31:45 — The female illustrator who solved the IFU problem

34:17 — Pink it and shrink it: designing a world built for men

38:49 — The Béa product explained: care, device, and the missing pathway

44:08 — Staying lean: AI tools, contractors, and the US expansion

46:04 — Hard lessons: letting people go, the rejection firehose

49:30 — Coping strategies (the healthier ones)

51:38 — New York: outperforming forecast by nearly 100%

52:59 — NHS gatekeeping vs. US insurance: two broken systems

55:25 — What’s next: sperm bank partnership and US scale

57:05 — Quickfire round

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Imagine wanting a child and realizing the system

wasn't built for you.

Not the waiting, not the confusion, not the

silence.

They're frustrated, it's not working, they don't know

what to do, they see their partner going

to the ends of the earth and experiencing

this emotional stress and trauma.

What if fertility care didn't begin under fluorescent

lights, but at home with clarity, guidance and

control?

This is Why Design, where we go behind

the scenes of the products shaping our lives

and the people brave enough to build them.

I mean, to be honest, that first year

was really principally just me trying to figure

out, like, how do I grapple with what

this idea is?

What is the vision?

What's the potential?

Is it actually feasible?

In this episode, I'm joined by Tess Cosad,

CEO and co-founder of Bayer Fertility, a

company building clinical-grade fertility treatment designed for

the real world, outside the clinic and inside

your life.

But this story isn't about tech, it's about

stakes.

Because early on, one of their first users

called from a hospital bed after an ectopic

pregnancy.

She had emergency surgery.

She's down a fallopian tube that impacts your

fertility.

And yet, here she is saying, I'm going

to try again.

And I just thought, my goodness, we've really

built something here.

That moment changes what product means.

It changes what design means.

In this episode, we talk about designing in

the hardest category there is, regulated medical hardware,

patient trust, and the emotional reality no pitch

deck can capture.

I'm Chris White, and this is Why Design.

And Tess, welcome to Why Design.

Great to have you on the show.

Great to be here, Chris.

Yeah, wonderful.

Well, we're going to dive in.

So Tess, you're the CEO and co-founder

of Bayer Fertility.

You're building clinical-grade fertility treatment that people

can use at home.

You've raised venture funding, launched in the UK,

and now you're doing it all again in

the US.

But before we get into your background, tell

me about a moment where everything shifted.

When did this move from, you know, interesting

problem to, I'm willing to risk everything on

this?

Uh, hearing you use the mouthful of clinical

-grade fertility care, even I had to remind

myself what that is.

So a moment that everything changed.

It's interesting.

It didn't actually all change for me until

a little while into the journey of building

Bayer.

Obviously, one of the things that we do

at Bayer is we make babies.

We help people make their babies.

And we started the company in 2020.

We closed our first round of funding sort

of early 2021 and started to build the

product.

Sort of brought in a team, raised more

funding.

It was sort of the venture go-go

days.

So we raised a lot of funding and

scaled up quite a big team.

And we're sort of building this medical device

and this treatment experience.

And on some level, I understood that it

was real.

And none of it quite hit home until

one of our users, one of our very

first users, called us from the hospital because

she'd conceived with her first Bayer device and

had an ectopic pregnancy and was in hospital

having had emergency surgery to remove the fallopian

tube.

And at that point, we'd actually already had

reports of positive pregnancies from other users.

And don't get me wrong, those were incredibly

impactful moments.

But this, I think, was the moment for

me that it became so very real because

we had someone who had a horrible experience

and cared enough about what we were doing

to call us from the hospital the day

after her surgery and say to us, I

want to try again though.

I am going to try again with Bayer.

And I just thought, my God.

I think two things hit home for me

in that moment was the gravity of the

thing that we were doing.

I always used to say, oh, we're changing

lives.

We're changing people's lives.

And it feels like such an airy fairy

and a sort of like blithe thing to

say.

And of course, you're helping people conceive.

Yeah, their lives are changing.

But in this moment, it had never felt

more true to me that this woman, this

brilliant, brilliant woman, ectopics are high risk, right?

She had emergency surgery.

She's down a fallopian tube.

That impacts your fertility.

And yet, here she is saying, I'm going

to try again.

And I just thought, my goodness, we've really

built something here.

Wow.

Yeah.

What a way to start the podcast.

Did she keep in touch?

Did she?

She did.

And she conceived again safely.

Her baby boy is.

Amazing.

Oh, he's going to be turning.

He's probably turning one this year, I think.

That's amazing.

It's pretty cool, huh?

That is really cool.

You know, you're right.

We do throw this kind of changing lives

around.

I've literally said it to people that worked

for me before in my profession.

You know, we are, you know, what we

do is changing lives in some sort.

And I suppose you could say that about,

you know, most kind of things and services

that are impactful.

But yeah, you really are there.

And that's, you know, if you need a

reason to come to work every morning.

It's a pretty good one.

Many more.

Yeah.

It's a pretty good one.

And it's interesting.

Anytime I'm dealing with a really big fire,

the universe gifts us a positive pregnancy report

just to remind us that like you're doing

the right thing.

Huge.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, we often get caught

in that moment of kind of like, just

before we started recording, you know, you said

you're putting out a tiny fire, you know,

and we're dealing with those day in, day

out.

They're all distractions from, and when you step

back, you think about the impact that you're

having, you know, and then to everyone that's

listening, you know, you're having impact, whatever you're

doing, whatever that moment you're in, you know,

think about kind of trying to think about

the bigger picture.

And what a big picture you're having there.

So that was amazing.

Thank you.

Thank you for sharing that.

Of course.

Let's dive back to the beginning then, because

your journey, really your career, it started off

marketing, if I'm correct, you know, and research

at an astrophysics laboratory, you know, so a

bit of a, you know, stratospheric jump.

So how did you find yourself, you know,

tell us about that journey from kind of,

from marketing and research into, you know, devices

and fertility, you know, and kind of being

a founder of a hardware company?

Yeah, it's, I wanted to be an astrophysicist

a very long time ago.

And I'm one of those wonderful cases where

my mathematical abilities were not quite up to

my career ambitions.

So I tried, I tried really hard and

then I went to business school.

It's where some of us failed STEM people

end up, I suppose.

So that was sort of a very humbling

moment that arrived fairly early on for me.

So I went to the business school and

sort of always said to myself, my dream

early on was I wanted to have an

office and a cubicle.

And I wanted one of those little lanyard

badges that clips pull out, tap in, you

know, the kind of all those things felt

very cool to me.

And I went, totally, absolutely, sort of look

back on it and laugh.

But that felt very cool at the time.

And, and I tried to apply to all

of the consulting firms and got rejected randomly

from every single one of them.

So another sort of humbling experience that taught

me that perhaps my future was not in

a cubicle, but I didn't quite know where

my future was.

And that was when I created my first

startup actually.

Sort of not in a typical arrangement, but

I went to work for a bigger media

company that were trying to create a venture

studio.

And they funded a project that I brought

to them that we were working on.

And at the time we built this incredible

technology.

I did not speak to a single user

because I was too shy.

So learned that lesson the hard way and

launched this amazing technology only to realize that

A, it was a little bit ahead of

its time.

And B, most of the people who we'd

built it for were like, ha, that's really

fun, but why do I need this?

So of course, humbled yet again.

And that is when I made the jump

into marketing.

So I was offered the opportunity to start

in that agency as a part of a

wider group.

And I jumped on it.

And I had the best time working with

some phenomenally interesting companies, sort of really got

deep into strategic branding, positioning, storytelling, sort of

developed a bunch of skills that I think

serve me now, although, you know, jury's out.

But had a really great time building that.

But I really was kind of itching to

build something.

I'd always wanted to build something.

And there were two things that I was

like phenomenally passionate about.

One was creating something that did some good

in the world and specifically solved an inequity

that felt arbitrary and unfair to me.

And two, I was very driven to create

a company where people would just love to

come to work.

The idea of creating something where people loved

coming to work felt so powerful and so

fun to me.

And right around, I'd sort of been running

the ad agency for a few years, went

freelance.

And then I met an embryologist who was

talking to me about this idea.

I never actually saw myself in fertility.

Honestly, it was not on my radar.

Of course, you're in your 20s.

Like, when is it ever?

For some people, it is.

For me, it wasn't.

And so I sort of met an embryologist.

We were talking about the space and the

technology.

And I think two things happened.

One is I really started to see with

my own eyes the inequities that exist in

fertility in particular and how we've landed with

a system that enables people with money to

have babies, healthy babies, and people without money

to just struggle alone and take chances.

And that really, like, plucked at that.

Well, hang on a second.

That's not fair, that sort of desire.

And then, yeah, creating a company where I

was able to build a team and start

creating that sort of culture.

Yeah.

And it was the early days were really,

really fun.

Really hard, but really fun.

Yeah, because you started, well, according to LinkedIn,

at least, started in 2020.

You said you raised first fundraising in 21,

I think you said earlier.

So starting a business during a global pandemic,

you know, how was that?

Yeah.

I incorporated the company literally three days after

we went into lockdown, I think.

So we're a real pandemic baby.

It was interesting.

I mean, to be honest, that first year

was really principally just me trying to figure

out, like, how do I grapple with what

this idea is?

What is the vision?

What's the potential?

Is it actually feasible?

You know, what we're actually talking about here,

the core technology that we built was a

medical device that allows someone to perform a

clinical insemination procedure on themselves at home.

And so if I were to put that

into sort of clearer language, we need to

create something that allows someone to reliably find

their cervix themselves.

I know a lot of medical students that

can't find cervix.

And so there was like a real design

challenge in the early days that was like,

wow, is it actually feasible?

And then, of course, the pivotal question is

you need money to build regulated medical hardware.

So can we raise money for it?

The first sort of 12, 18 months of

Bayes sort of 2020 into early 21 was

a lot of grappling with like feasibility, building

decks, trying to pitch, trying to figure it

out and eating a lot of beans because,

of course, you're not taking a check at

that point because there's no money.

The early days were a real grind, but,

you know, we made it through.

And yeah, how was that?

How was that fundraising journey for you then?

Because we met at the Fix, didn't we,

last year in the Howard campus.

And one of the themes there, especially from

the investors and the women entrepreneurs was how

the cards are definitely stacked against, you know,

femtech and female engineers because the majority of

the investment landscape is dominated by middle-aged

white men who are, you know, they get

queasy at best over kind of even the

dimension of women's parts.

Vaginas.

Vagina, yeah.

And there was a talk, one of the

standout talks was basically the whole crowd just

shouting vagina, you know, and it was liberating.

But it was, you know, take the fun

side of it, you know, it was a

real problem.

And, you know, you're kind of raising funds

as a very complicated kind of problem to

solve in a very complicated regulatory and funding

landscape.

How did you navigate that?

It's interesting.

There's a real irony to the question, which

is we're sort of often lumped in femtech

as femtech.

But actually, if you look at the core

function of the device that we've created, it

is a sperm stack.

It exists to solve for male factor infertility.

Now, there are things around it that obviously

solve for female factor infertility, you know, timing,

ovulations, all of these are really helpful things.

But on broad strokes, the core purpose of

this device is it's a male factor infertility

solution.

And so it always makes me laugh when

we're branded a femtech company, because actually, I

say to my team, if we were mentech,

we'd have raised a lot more money a

lot more easily.

Yeah, surely with the marketing background, you could

play it into that.

Well, and I should, right?

But what's interesting is still today, women in

heterosexual couples, women are the drivers of the

buying decisions and timelines and pathways.

And a lot of the labor that happens

in an infertility context is, labor is probably

not quite the right word, but a lot

of the work that happens in infertility is

on women.

And so we brand ourselves to be bought

by an appeal to women.

I remember you saying it because you, I

mean, it's funny, actually, when you mentioned that

you were when you started your first business,

you were so shy, and you wouldn't wouldn't

speak to the customers.

And yet, first, our first interaction was you

were on stage talking about how times have

changed.

Yeah.

And I think I remember you saying, yeah,

it was, you know, it's yet the end

user is the male problem, but it's the

women that have to empower, it's them that

you need to get on board to push

it because leave men to their own devices.

And we ain't doing anything.

We're putting our head in the sand, you

know, because it's, you know, it's demasculating, isn't

it, to admit that you kind of have

a problem down there.

It is.

And it's a real shame that it is,

right?

Because the more the more shame there is

on the male side, the more that, like

on the female side, they sort of pick

up and do the work that the shame

is preventing the male side from sort of

sitting with grappling with and engaging with.

And what was always really interesting to me

is, you know, obviously, not everyone gets pregnant

with our technology.

That's just the name of the game, right?

IVF is not a sure that either.

But we would sometimes get complaints into customer

support.

And obviously you give someone a support email

address and they think that anything they say

is, you know, not going to be read

by a human.

But of course, the entire team would read

all of these.

And like, we feel it in our bones.

Like, yeah.

And pretty consistently, some of the worst emails

we ever got were from the male partner,

the husband.

Really?

And look, I have so much compassion for

it.

They're frustrated.

It's not working.

They don't know what to do.

They see their partner going to the ends

of the earth and experiencing this emotional stress

and trauma.

And they feel powerless.

And the moment where they're not powerless is

when they get to complain to someone and

yell at someone.

And boy, do they come out swinging.

And it was always so predictable and so

painful.

And, you know, Chris, we have so much

compassion for it.

But it was, yeah, a really interesting thing

that I learned along the way.

I didn't think we'd have to grapple with

that.

But yeah, we did.

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And let's talk before you make the call.

There's so many layers to dig into, isn't

there, from a psychological level.

It's horrible but fascinating at the same time.

And imagine when you kind of embarked on

this.

You would have been naive to these coming

down the line.

And, you know, but wow.

It's super interesting.

So we've kind of skipped around a little

bit because I do this when there's a

really interesting topic we can dive into.

I kind of go off script.

I love going off script.

But really interesting because I sat in a

few of the side sessions around branding and

marketing and some of the guerrilla marketing as

well around kind of speaking to men and

always adding humor to, I can't remember the

one that was at the end of the

brand, but it was to do with fertility

as well.

But is there any, how are you tackling

that, you know, in terms of that, you

know, the shame and kind of maybe de

-shaming it, you know, or kind of helping

the men out?

Yeah, it's a really great question.

So I think there's like, I adjust humor

a little bit depending on the stakeholder.

Yeah.

So when I'm talking to investors, I actually

quite like to weave a lot of humor

and I, you know, drop in the word

vagina.

If I want to go on level hard,

I'll sometimes use the word vulva, like sperm,

penis, erectile dysfunction, all of this is like

the natural language of what we do.

And I think kind of bringing it in

with a little bit of levity, like, you

know, play with it feels like wrong set

of words to use.

I'm having like this line of logic, but

it's not, it doesn't have to be serious,

right?

Like you can leave a little bit of

room for someone to kind of raise their

eyebrows.

And then just like handle that with levity

and move on.

I think the stakeholders where I'm careful is

our users.

Obviously people who are experiencing infertility.

I, Chris, I would not wish that on

anyone.

It is the worst.

And so grappling with it a little bit

myself, it truly is just one of the

worst experiences you decide that you would like

to conceive and then you can't.

And the medical system says, we'll go home

and try harder.

And the NICE guideline says have sex every

two to three days for 12 to 24

months.

Imagine being told to go and have sex.

Now for many people that, you know, music

to my ears, how great, wonderful, yay.

But it's just not practical advice.

And like, you know, I don't know anyone

in my circles who is like, absolutely, I'd

happily have sex every two days for 24

months.

Why not?

Like, you know, like it just doesn't fit

with life sometimes.

And it takes the romance out of it

and the shine if it's just a to

-do list.

100%.

It's a thing that you just have to

get done.

And so it tears people apart.

And so one of the ways, I think

we have a very specific tone of voice

with users.

And this is where I think as a

founder, you have to be careful that it's

not, I mean, in the early days, it

obviously is your voice, right?

It kind of has to be while you're

shaping it.

But in time, it has to become the

brand voice.

But really to hold people with compassion and

really hear them and hold them in moments

where they're just so vulnerable.

And then in moments where, you know, you're

either going to laugh or cry, right?

Sometimes people just need to cry and they

just need to be held and witnessed.

And I think we do a really good

job of that.

And sometimes they just kind of also need

to laugh because there's nothing else you can

do.

And I think we do a great job

of that.

You know, we play with it.

I write a bulletin every two weeks.

And goodness, the topics, you know, we've covered

with great hilarity.

We covered the trend of scrotal cooling.

That was honestly, we've never had a better

time with puns ever than writing that one.

And, you know, the medical device we've created

is obviously it looks big, right?

Like, and it kind of looks intimidating.

And one of the main questions we get

is like, oh, my God, how big is

it really?

Is it really going to hurt?

Like, where does it go?

And so we had a really good time

with that.

I think we, you know, compared it to

one of the sort of brooding characters in

a romance novel and sort of really played

with it.

And I think sometimes that tone of voice

and to come back to it, that kind

of marketing and we are dealing with a

space that is shame laden and it's full

of taboo and I think just understanding when

to use levity to just lighten it.

Things are so heavy when you're on this

journey.

And I think learning how to build that

voice and do that has been a really

powerful journey.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Because I imagine that, you know, all your

years in marketing and venture building, you're not

approaching anything as complex as this, all the

different emotions.

And yeah, but fascinating.

Fascinating.

So going back to the investors side, you

know, in the early days, what did investors

push back on hardest in those early days?

You know, what was some of the challenges

you had to overcome other than what we've

already talked about, I guess?

Gosh, I mean, what didn't they push back

on?

Oh, I'll be honest.

In the early days, one of the things

I got most was, hang on a second.

You're not a clinician.

You're not infertile.

You've never built hardware before.

Why on earth are you the person to

make this happen?

Also, you're a female founder and 2%

of VC dollars go to female-founded companies.

So you're fighting for a smaller pool of

capital to begin with, right?

And then in that pool of capital, everyone's

like, wait, hang on.

And they're trying to do the math on

the percentage chance that this is ever going

to become anything at all.

And so, of course, it's probably going to

come as no surprise that to close my

very first round of funding, I ended up

speaking to something like 283 investors.

And I think I closed 15 of them.

And, you know, of course, like I was

pretty naive at the time.

I'm sort of a little bit more battle

-hardened now, I suppose.

But you sort of raised 500k.

And with this 500k, I thought, my goodness,

we're going to build the product and get

through regs and get it to market and

start generating stuff.

It's all going to happen.

Of course, that 500k lasted like five seconds

to go back out and raise again.

But I think certainly the pushback in the

early days was, who the hell are you

to think that you're going to create this?

And I remember, you know, I had a

co-founder, a male co-founder.

And I remember I was in a call

with an investor once.

And I kind of didn't hit home that

there was any kind of like structural issue

at all until this call when he was

being asked what his vision for the company

was.

And I was being asked how I would

manage family and flight schedules between here in

the U.S. when it came time to

launch in the U.S. market.

I was like, wow, shouldn't I get, like,

I'm driving this whole thing.

Like, I'm the one, right?

Like, shouldn't I get asked what my vision

is?

I came out of that call and I

really sat with that.

And I thought, my goodness, that doesn't seem

right.

And so there was a lot of pushback

in the early days.

And, you know, sheer force of will.

Even to this day, I think a sheer

force of will.

We're still coasting on sheer force of will

that, you know, exists as a company because

raising capital hasn't been easy.

But, you know, why you?

Why this?

Why this technology?

Will this company in the market fail?

Why won't you fail?

You're going to fail like them.

What's different?

Like, there's all of this pushback happens all

of the time.

And I think the core theme of everything

that has come through is probably, like, we'll

find a way because we always have.

You know, I now have a five-year

track record of, like, biting tooth and nail

so that this thing is going to become

a thing, right?

Like, you know, going gray.

I now have a chronic health condition as

a result of stress.

You know, I'm not the only founder that

has one of those, right?

And I'm kind of laughing as I say

it.

When I discovered this, it was obviously, like,

wildly painful to grapple with.

It's sort of health issues that ironically impact

fertility, actually.

So for me, there's sort of this.

You've got an answer now.

Exactly.

It's like a universe.

It's sort of an enormous fuck you moment.

But to be honest, like, I turned it

around into like, well, actually, hang on a

second.

Like, I've given so much up for this.

I'm not going to quit now.

Absolutely not.

And so, yeah, like, we're kind of rolling

in the U.S. Our first pregnancy reports

are starting to come through from users in

the U.S. And that's been really rewarding

as well.

But I think investor pushback continues to be,

like, one of the dominating themes of Bayer,

which means essentially the dominating themes of my

life.

And it's very much, why will this succeed

when all that has come before has not?

Mm hmm.

I mean, you've got, like you say, you've

got five years plus of data now of

pregnancies, of successful births, you know, and.

You know, that in itself is fantastic.

It's awesome.

How many?

Do you know how many successful births that

there have been?

So births are kind of hard to track

because obviously it's quite downstream of when we

planned the whole proceeding.

But I think in the U.K. that

we know of, probably in the hundreds.

That's incredible.

We've got, yeah, those that actually come back

nine months later and tell us and send

photographs, like that's obviously far fewer.

But it's incredible when they do.

It's incredible when they do.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you just need to show the

investors that I'm sure you've got a wall

of baby photos.

Yeah, and it's remarkable how that doesn't move

the needle at all.