Fertility & family planning · Egg freezing concierge
Lilia
A Y Combinator backed service that bundled discounted egg freezing cycles with a single point of contact for scheduling, meds, and clinic referrals. Founded in Toronto in 2019, it later centered its clinical network in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Y Combinator now lists the company as inactive.
A three month wait for a lab result
Alyssa Atkins was 29 and had just left a long term relationship when a friend went through premature menopause. The scare sent her to a doctor for a fertility test, one that measures ovarian reserve, or how many eggs a woman has left. Then she waited. The result came back in the mail, in the kind of clinical language that raises more questions than it answers.
Atkins told The Globe and Mail in 2019, “What was missing was the end-to-end support of an intimidating journey,” adding, “Anything that existed was very sterile and missed how to communicate with women about this. I wanted a company that made it all more approachable and accessible.”
She named the company after herself, more or less: Lilia. It launched in Toronto as a two person team, and it was Atkins’s first venture as a founder after stints at the entrepreneurship program Next 36, education software company Top Hat, and the online services company CareGuide, where she went from first growth hire to VP of Marketing.
From at-home test kit to concierge
The original pitch was narrower than the company Lilia became. In 2019 it was building an at-home hormone test meant to estimate ovarian reserve and predict the likely age of menopause, sold as a first step toward a broader fertility information hub. Atkins told FASHION Magazine that November, “We’re the most ambitious generation with the most amount of data at our fingertips,” describing the gap she wanted to fill.
By the time Lilia went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, as a solo founder with an acceptance rate under 1%, the product had shifted toward what it is best known for: a concierge service that matches members with vetted fertility clinics, negotiates preferred pricing, and manages the logistics of a cycle, contracts, appointments, and medication, for a single flat fee. Egg freezing itself is performed by the partner clinic, not by Lilia.
The problem it targeted
Egg freezing sits in an awkward spot in American health care. It is elective for most members, rarely covered by insurance, and priced unevenly across clinics, often padded by medication a patient never uses. Lilia’s pitch was that a single flat fee, negotiated in bulk with a short list of providers and tuned to order only the medication a member actually needs, could cut roughly $6,000 off a typical cycle.
By 2022, under the medical leadership of Dr. Roohi Jeelani, the company said it could offer the full process for $9,000 all in, undercutting the $15,000 and up quoted at many clinics directly. “The whole process,” a Forbes writer noted, quoting Atkins, “takes less than a month.”
Growth, then a step back
Lilia operated with doctors in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco by mid 2022, with a stated plan to go national by the end of 2023. On her own site, Atkins says, “Building Lilia from $0 to $850,000 in revenue without ever relying on ads.” She also lists partnerships secured with clinics including NYU, Columbia, and Kindbody. A 2024 feature on egg freezing startups still described Lilia as an active concierge charging $9,500 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, $10,500 in New York City, and $840 a year for storage.
Atkins has since described, in her own words, why she moved on: “I realized the only way to reach venture scale was to be in the provision of care (ie build clinics). The egg freezing market is still too small to support this. I secured an acquisition offer from the industry incumbent, but it fell through because of a visa immigration issue.” She later became Head of Marketing at Limitless, an AI hardware company formerly known as Rewind. Y Combinator now lists Lilia as Inactive.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed round | $800,000 raised in about five weeks in August 2019, against an initial target of $250,000, reported by The Globe and Mail and matched by PitchBook’s deal history. | Independent reporting |
| Seed round | $1.4 million raised by April 2020 from Y Combinator, Garage Capital, Panache Ventures, and Hustle Fund, reported by Forbes. | Independent reporting |
| Total raised, company-stated | Atkins told Forbes in July 2022 the company had raised “roughly $1.5 million to date.” That is below the sum of the two rounds already reported by 2020. | Differs from reported rounds |
| Total raised, PitchBook | PitchBook lists cumulative funding of $2.35 million across an accelerator investment, two seed rounds, and a February 2022 secondary transaction, from 14 named and unnamed investors. | Differs from company figure |
| Revenue | “Building Lilia from $0 to $850,000 in revenue without ever relying on ads.” per Atkins’s own site. No independent revenue figure was found. | Company-stated |
| Clinic partnerships | Atkins names NYU, Columbia, and Kindbody as partner clinics. No independent confirmation from those institutions was found. | Company-stated |
| SEC filings | No Form D was found in SEC EDGAR’s full text search under “Lilia, Inc.,” “hellolilia,” or “Alyssa Atkins,” as of September 25, 2026. A company called LILIA AI, INC., based in Houston, Texas, does have a 2026 Form D on file, but its address and filer details show it is a different, unrelated company. | Not found |
| Current status | Y Combinator’s company page lists Lilia as “Inactive.” PitchBook, in a page dated July 31, 2026, lists the company as “Private” and stage “Generating Revenue.” | Differs from YC status |
Read plainly: the two funding rounds that made the press, $800,000 in 2019 and $1.4 million in 2020, are independently reported and consistent with PitchBook’s deal-by-deal history. Everything after that gets murkier. The company’s own mid-2022 total is lower than the sum of its own announced rounds, PitchBook’s later cumulative figure is higher than either, no SEC Form D exists for the company under any name tried here, and the aggregators still show it as an operating business months after Y Combinator marked it inactive and its founder described stepping away.
What to watch
- Whether hellolilia.com, which still returned a live page as of September 25, 2026, is actively maintained or simply left up after the founder’s departure.
- Whether Crunchbase or PitchBook update their status fields to match Y Combinator’s “Inactive” tag.
- Confirmation of the acquisition talks Atkins described, including the name of the “industry incumbent” involved and what the visa issue was.
- Whether any successor entity connected to Atkins or Lilia ever files a Form D or other SEC record.
In their words
“Anything that existed was very sterile and missed how to communicate with women about this. I wanted a company that made it all more approachable and accessible.”
Alyssa Atkins, founder and CEO, The Globe and Mail, 2019 · Independent
“We’re the most ambitious generation with the most amount of data at our fingertips,”
Alyssa Atkins, FASHION Magazine, Nov 19, 2019 · Independent
“We believe that in the future, egg freezing will be as common as birth control,”
Alyssa Atkins, Forbes, Apr 23, 2020 · Independent
“The company also lowers the barrier to entry by letting you skip annoying administrative hoops,”
Alyssa Atkins, The Hustle, Apr 5, 2024 · Independent
“I realized the only way to reach venture scale was to be in the provision of care (ie build clinics). The egg freezing market is still too small to support this. I secured an acquisition offer from the industry incumbent, but it fell through because of a visa immigration issue.”
Alyssa Atkins, founder’s own site · Company-stated
“I once shipped a customer’s meds to my house while she was travelling and then personally delivered them to her.”
Alyssa Atkins, founder’s own site · Company-stated
Related companies
Sources
- IndependentLilia company profile
- IndependentToronto fertility startup Lilia attracts early interest from investors
- IndependentAlyssa Atkins Is Changing the Way We Think About Fertility
- IndependentFemBeat: YC-Backed Lilia Raises A $1.4 Million Seed Round To Help Women Navigate And Celebrate Egg Freezing
- IndependentY Combinator-Backed Lilia Launches A More Convenient And Affordable Egg Freezing Offering Built For The Millennial Women
- IndependentOn Your Time: The Startups Making Egg Freezing More Accessible
- IndependentBuilding a YC-Backed Fertility Startup with Lilia’s Alyssa Atkins
- IndependentLilia company profile: valuation, funding and investors
- IndependentAlyssa Atkins founder bio
- CompanyLilia homepage
- CompanyOur Story
- CompanyPersonal site and founder bio, “Things I’m proud of” and “Lilia, founding a YC company”
- Not foundFull text search for “Lilia, Inc.,” “hellolilia,” and “Alyssa Atkins”: no matching filings
- Public recordCompany submissions for CIK 0002111903, LILIA AI, INC., Houston, Texas: a distinct, unrelated entity
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
