Ferring buys IVF startup Gameto for up to $1.38B
What's the deal? Switzerland's Ferring PharmaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has agreed to buy US women's health startup Gameto for up to $1.38 billion, expanding its position in fertility treatments. The total value depends on hitting development, regulatory, and commercial milestones.
What each side brings: Privately held Ferring markets IVF drugs like Menopur, Rekovelle, and Bravelle, which stimulate egg production and maturation. Austin-based Gameto builds reproductive-health technology, led by its Fertilo in vitro maturation platform.
What's the endgame? Fertilo uses stem cells to make ovarian support cells in the lab, generating an organoid sometimes called an "ovary in a dish." Traditional IVF needs roughly two weeks of hormone injections; Fertilo, now in US phase 3 testing, can cut that to two or three days, according to Gameto — babies have already been born using the platform in Peru and elsewhere. Co-founder Martin Varsavsky calls Gameto his sixth unicorn; the company traces back to a Harvard fellowship in George Church's lab aimed at growing human eggs from scratch, a goal that still hasn't been achieved.
The founding story: Varsavsky, who earlier built the US fertility-clinic network Prelude Fertility (now part of Inception Fertility), says Gameto grew out of a 2020 fellowship he funded at Harvard in George Church's lab, named after his father, the astrophysicist Carlos M. Varsavsky. The company started that year with about $3 million from friends and fellow entrepreneurs, including Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, Atomic founder Jack Abraham and early Uber investor Shervin Pishevar. The fellowship paid for the PhD of geneticist Christian Kramme, now Gameto's chief scientific officer, who worked out how to make the ovarian support cells in the lab. Dina Radenkovic Turner joined as co-founder and CEO in 2021 and turned that work into Fertilo. According to Varsavsky, the first baby conceived with Fertilo was born in Lima on 16 December 2024, and by August 2026 there were five babies and more than 20 pregnancies.
Where it stands: Fertilo is still investigational in the US, where a Phase 3 trial plans to enrol 500 participants, and is already available in Australia, Argentina, Peru and Mexico, European Biotechnology reports. The companies have not disclosed the upfront payment or a closing date.
What else Gameto builds: The startup is developing Deovo, a lab model to test drugs' effects on the female reproductive system, and Ameo, a cell therapy for unwanted effects of menopause.
Why now? Ferring recorded revenues of more than €2.5 billion last year, up 10%, driven mainly by Menopur and bladder cancer therapy Adstiladrin. Buying Gameto adds a next-generation platform to a fertility portfolio built over decades.
What they said: "Ferring has been committed to helping people build families for more than 50 years," said Jean-Frédéric Paulsen, the Swiss group's chief executive officer. The combination creates "an opportunity to advance new approaches in fertility care and reach more patients worldwide," he added.
The signal: An established fertility-drug maker is paying a steep, milestone-based price to secure stem-cell IVF technology before it reaches market. The deal signals that incumbents see faster, lower-burden fertility treatment as the next competitive frontier in reproductive medicine.
Read more: Gameto, pharmaphorum, Bloomberg, European Biotechnology, Martin Varsavsky on X
Image credit: Gameto
