Yellow IVF founder Ambika Bhaik on fixing the part of fertility care nobody talks about

When Ambika Bhaik first sat in a fertility clinic alongside a family member, the conversation that stayed with her was not about medicine. It was about how many IVF packages to buy. "We started calculating whether the journey could cost Rs 10 lakh or more if multiple cycles were needed," she recalls.

"The uncertainty was so discouraging that it actually delayed our decision-making and added stress to an already emotional situation." That moment sits at the root of Yellow IVF, the Gurugram-based fertility chain Bhaik founded in December 2023. Her argument is blunt: the industry has quietly trained patients to accept financial anxiety as a normal part of trying to have a child, and she wants to take it apart.

The scale of the problem is larger than the silence around it suggests. "One in every six couples is battling infertility," Bhaik says, pushing back on the idea that it is rare or that it is a woman's issue alone. Male factor infertility, she points out, accounts for around 40% of cases.

Yet couples routinely wait years before seeking help. "It's not uncommon for patients to spend eight to ten years trying on their own," she says, by which point age has narrowed the very options that might have worked earlier.

What patients want, in her telling, is simple. "For patients, success is simple: a healthy pregnancy and ultimately a baby." The trouble is that the system often optimises for something else, the individual cycle, the package, the transaction.

Why Yellow IVF shares the risk instead of selling cycles

Her answer is a pricing structure the company calls the Yellow Contract. If a patient does not conceive after two cycles, every cycle from the third onward is capped at a cost-only fee of Rs 50,000, however many it takes. "From the third cycle onward, we walk the path with our patients," Bhaik says. "We share in the challenge rather than asking them to shoulder all the uncertainty alone."

She is clear that this is meant as a statement of intent rather than a discount. "While others may focus on selling cycles, we focus on supporting patients until they achieve the outcome they came to us for." A rival could copy the structure tomorrow, she acknowledges, but that is not where she thinks the moat is. "While a pricing model can be copied, the mindset behind it is much harder to replicate."

That mindset also shapes how Yellow IVF grows. Instead of owning every clinic, the company runs a network of about 20 owned and partner-run centres, with sites in Gurugram, Kashmir, Chandigarh, Delhi and Bhubaneswar, plus recent partnerships with CARE IVF in Kolkata and Fertilite IVF in Bengaluru. The model brings systems, technology and shared services to established local doctors rather than competing with them. Bhaik says partner selection is the part she refuses to rush. "We'd rather grow slower with the right partners than faster with the wrong ones."

The model brings systems, technology and shared services to established local doctors rather than competing with them. Bhaik says partner selection is the part she refuses to rush. "We'd rather grow slower with the right partners than faster with the wrong ones."

How does Yellow IVF's pricing model actually work

In a conventional IVF arrangement, patients pay the full price of every cycle. Because success is rarely guaranteed on the first attempt, each failure adds both emotional and financial weight, and most couples start with no real sense of how many cycles they will need.

Yellow IVF flips that maths from the third cycle. The first two are priced normally, but after that, the patient pays only the capped Rs 50,000 cost-only fee. The longer and harder the journey becomes, the less the clinic earns from it.

The point, Bhaik argues, is alignment. "We define success the same way patients define it, a successful conception and the opportunity to build a family." Patients, she adds, "are not looking for the cheapest IVF cycle, they are looking for the success."

The harder test will be doing this at scale. Yellow IVF has said it wants to run 100 centres by 2030 and reach roughly Rs 750 crore in revenue, with early international expansion planned across South Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa.

The company is also building artificial intelligence tools on its own clinical and embryology data to support doctors on calls such as embryo selection and cycle planning, though Bhaik is careful not to oversell it. "We are not currently using AI in live clinical workflows yet, but we are actively building it."

What she keeps returning to is not technology or expansion, but trust. "I hope Yellow becomes synonymous with trust," she says. Strip away the targets and the valuations, and the mission she names is smaller and more human: "to make the fertility journey feel hopeful, not overwhelming."