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David Sable: MBA in IVF Entrepreneurship – Financing Your IVF Start-Up, Part 1

David Sable/substack.com

Nov 8, 2026, 13:59

David Sable: MBA in IVF Entrepreneurship – Financing Your IVF Start-Up, Part 1

David Sable, Director of Celmatix and AutoIVF and Advisory Board Member at Conceivable Life Sciences, shared on LinkedIn:

“MBA in IVF Entrepreneurship: financing your IVF start-up, part 1

Periodic series for REI’s, embryologists, and our colleagues in the reproductive medicine founder ecosystem

There are two ways to pay for building and growing a company once you’ve burned through the cash you start out with: take out a loan (debt) or sell a piece of the company (equity).

The basic science of accounting describes the balance sheet as a company’s storyboard, and the story is what we own and control (assets) and how we paid for it (debt + equity).

Consider debt first.

The advantage of borrowing money instead of selling equity is that you get to keep more of your company for yourself.

The disadvantage is that if the company fails, the founders have to give whatever assets are left to the lenders. But we don’t talk much about negotiating a loan with commercial banks in pre-revenue reproductive medicine. Why? Because development-stage companies don’t qualify for loans.

Commercial banking is pretty conservative: regardless of how wildly successful your company becomes, the bank gets paid back only what it lent you, plus interest. You could have a 100x exit from your little startup, but at the end of the term of the loan, the bank only gets a check (ok, a wire) for the principal.

Since the bank’s upside is defined and capped, the bankers focus on protecting the downside. And they protect the downside by making sure that even of the business halts, they still get their money back.

So, unless the borrower already has a profitable business that generates enough cash to pay the loan back from day one, bankers insist on some form of guaranteed repayment: a co-signer who will guarantee the loan, or an asset that can be sold or transferred to the bank (my first commercial loan was guaranteed by a second mortgage on our just-purchased first home).

Biotech companies are too expensive to finance with an Upper West Side apartment, even a three-bedroom with a Hudson River view.

So debt’s out. We need to sell equity.

Next: But how much of the company, and for how much money?”

David Sable: MBA in IVF Entrepreneurship – Financing Your IVF Start-Up, Part 1