Martin Varsavsky's companies and exits, from Viatel to Gameto
Ferring agreed on 27 October 2026 to buy Gameto, a fertility biotech Martin Varsavsky co-founded and chairs, for up to $1.38B. Varsavsky calls it his sixth unicorn. He has started 13 companies since 1986, in telecoms, internet access, renewable energy, fertility and medical software.
Gameto develops Fertilo, a treatment that matures a woman's eggs in the lab. It cuts the hormone injections before IVF or egg freezing from about two weeks to about three days. Fertilo is sold in Australia, Argentina, Peru and Mexico, and is in a Phase 3 trial in the United States.
The $1.38B is the maximum. Part of it is paid only if Gameto reaches development, regulatory and sales milestones, and the amount paid at closing was not disclosed. The deal has not closed. Gameto raised $117M from investors before the sale.
The company grew out of a 2020 fellowship Varsavsky funded at Harvard, in George Church's lab, named after his father. Dina Radenkovic Turner co-founded it with him and is the chief executive. Varsavsky counts Gameto as the sixth unicorn he has founded. Below are the six, with the price each one reached.
Three of the six companies Varsavsky calls unicorns have a published price of $1B or more
The six companies Martin Varsavsky counts as unicorns, by the price each reached. Dashed line: $1B.
Source: Dealroom.co, company and buyer announcements
Viatel's $1.2B is Varsavsky's own figure for what the company was worth when he sold his shares in 1997, a year after it listed on Nasdaq. Viatel filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Jazztel and Eolia reached their prices years after he had left them. Ya.com sold for €550M, about $490M at the time. No price has been published for Prelude Fertility, which now operates under Inception Fertility, the largest IVF provider in the United States.
Upbringing
Varsavsky was born in Buenos Aires in 1960 to a Jewish family. His father, Carlos Varsavsky, was an astrophysicist. When he was 17 the family left Argentina as refugees during the military dictatorship, after his cousin David was disappeared. They settled in New York.
He studied at New York University (bachelor's degree, 1981) and Columbia University (master's in international affairs, 1983, and an MBA, 1985). While at Columbia he ran a property business in Tribeca and SoHo. In 1986 he co-founded Medicorp Sciences in Montreal with César Milstein, who had won the 1984 Nobel Prize in medicine. Medicorp made early commercial HIV and prostate-cancer tests.
He has seven children. He and his wife, Nina, had their younger children through IVF, which he gives as the reason he moved into fertility in 2016. He chairs the Varsavsky Foundation, which built the education portals Educ.ar in Argentina and Educarchile in Chile.
Companies
In the 1990s he started three telecom and internet companies, Viatel in the US and Jazztel and Ya.com in Spain. In the 2000s came EINSTEINet in Germany, which failed, Fon, a WiFi-sharing network backed by Google and Skype, and Eolia, a wind and solar producer. Since 2016 he has started three fertility companies, a self-driving fleet company, a solar company and Certuma, a medical software company he runs.
The 13 companies Martin Varsavsky has started since 1986
Source: Dealroom.co, company announcements
Few founders have started three or more companies that reached $1B. Dealroom counts every company with a $1B valuation or exit as a unicorn, including ones that later fell below it. Its founder records list the people below as founders of three or more.
Dealroom's records do not flag Varsavsky's companies as unicorns, so he is not on the list from the records. On published prices he would have three, which places him in this group. On his own count of six he would be level with Elon Musk.
Founders of three or more unicorns
Source: Dealroom.co
What this means
Varsavsky has started 13 companies over 40 years. Three of them have a published price of $1B or more: Jazztel, Eolia and now Gameto, though Gameto's full price depends on milestones it has not yet reached. That would make him one of 17 founders with three or more unicorns, counting the 16 in Dealroom's records. Gameto is the first of his fertility companies with a disclosed sale price.