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Martin Varsavsky: Gameto Has Been Acquired by Ferring for 1.38 Billion Dollars
Martin Varsavsky/LinkedIn
Oct 28, 2026, 15:45

Martin Varsavsky: Gameto Has Been Acquired by Ferring for 1.38 Billion Dollars

Martin Varsavsky, Founder and CEO of Certuma, shared on LinkedIn:

“Gameto, my sixth unicorn, was just acquired by Ferring for 1.38 billion dollars.

In 2020 I endowed a fellowship at Harvard in my father’s name, Carlos M. Varsavsky, in the lab of George Church, one of the world’s leading geneticists.

Its goal: to make human eggs in the lab.

Gameto grew out of it.

Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the Swiss fertility drug maker, is acquiring Gameto for up to $1.3825 billion.

I am a co-founder. This is its story.

I came to fertility in 2016 with Prelude Fertility, a network of US clinics I built, now part of Inception, the largest fertility network in North America. Inside those clinics I learned that IVF works, but it is brutal.

For two weeks a woman injects herself with hormones so her ovaries release many eggs at once: around 28 shots, ultrasounds, blood tests, bloating and mood swings.

Many women go through it once and never again. Every one who stops is a pregnancy that never happens.

Fertilo lasts 3 days and takes one shot. That is a huge improvement.

In 2020 we started Gameto with about $3 million from friends, among them Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jack Abraham of Atomic and Shervin Pishevar, an early Uber investor. Making an egg proved enormously hard; nobody has done it yet.

The fellowship paid for the PhD of Christian Kramme, a Californian geneticist who worked out at the Harvard team on how to make in the lab the cells that surround an egg in the ovary and help it mature.

He is now Gameto’s chief scientific officer and has been fundamental in our development.

In 2021 I brought in Dina Turner as co-founder and CEO.

She was 26, a physician trained at University College London who had competed in STEM olympiads, and one of the brightest people I have ever worked with.

Many questioned the bet on someone that young.

It paid off incredibly well. I had a moonshot and a fellowship.

Dina turned them into a very successful company.

She looked at Christian’s cells and saw a product: if the egg was out of reach, we would do the ovary’s work in the lab.

That became Fertilo.

With Fertilo a woman takes hormones for two or three days, about 80% fewer shots. Her eggs are collected immature and spend a day in the lab with those cells, which do the ovary’s job. Then they are fertilized as in any IVF cycle. The cells never enter her body.

On December 16, 2024, the first baby conceived this way was born in Lima.

By August there were five babies and more than twenty pregnancies.

Three gentle rounds beat one painful round many don’t want to repeat.

Gameto is the sixth company I have built to pass a billion dollars, after Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com, Eolia Renovables, sold in 2017, and Inception Fertility, which absorbed Prelude.

Telecoms, internet, clean energy, clinics, biotech: nothing in common, and in every one the team mattered most.

Thank you to Dina, to Christian and to the whole absolutely brilliant Gameto team.

We will go on with Ferring to turn Fertilo into a mass product available to all women.”

Stay informed with the latest updates in fertility and reproductive medicine on Fertility News.

Brian Armstrong of Coinbase Carlos M. Varsavsky Christian Kramme Ferring Pharmaceuticals Fertility Fertility News Gameto Headlines Inception IVF Jack Abraham of Atomic OBGYN Prelude Fertility reproductive health Reproductive Medicine Shervin Pishevar Women’s Health
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