The Business of Building Families: Ethical Entrepreneurship in the Fertility Sector

There is a particular kind of silence that sits in a fertility clinic waiting room. It is not the silence of calm. It is the silence of couples who have already been disappointed ,by their bodies, by their hopes, and sometimes, by the clinics they trusted with both. Dr. Manjunath CS has spent nearly two decades in that silence. He knows exactly what it costs. And he built an entire business around the belief that it does not have to be that way.

In August 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that had shuttered businesses and shattered confidence, Dr. Manjunath launched Baby Science IVF. The timing seemed foolhardy. The ambition seemed larger still. He wasn't planting a single clinic in a safe, affluent Bengaluru neighbourhood and waiting for patients to find him. He was staking a claim in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities ,Mangaluru, Bijapur, Kolar ,places where couples dealing with infertility had long accepted, almost as a matter of geography, that truly excellent IVF care was simply not available to them. That it existed somewhere else. For someone else.

Dr. Manjunath disagreed. Loudly, and in the form of a business plan.

The Diagnosis Before the Business

To understand why Baby Science was built the way it was, you need to understand what Dr. Manjunath had spent the previous fifteen years watching.

He had trained at Homerton University in London, one of the world's leading centres for reproductive medicine. He had served as Medical Director at NOVA IVF Fertility in Bengaluru. He had co-founded the Mathrutva Fertility Center in 2015. Across each of these roles, one pattern repeated itself with quiet consistency: the quality of IVF care in India dropped sharply the moment you left a major city. Not because the patients were different. Not because the science was unavailable. But because nobody had built the infrastructure, recruited the expertise, or made the economic case for doing it properly outside the metros.

He had also watched something else ,the slow erosion of patient trust in a sector where aggressive marketing, vague success rate claims, and surprise billing had become, for too many clinics, a business model. Couples were arriving at consultations already exhausted by information they couldn't verify, and costs they hadn't been warned about. The emotional weight of infertility is crushing enough without the added burden of feeling managed rather than cared for.

By 2020, he had seen enough. Baby Science IVF was not just a clinic chain. It was, in a very real sense, a rebuttal.

Transparency as Strategy

The Baby Science model had three non-negotiables ,and notably, all three were about honesty before they were about medicine.

The first was clinical transparency. Every couple who walked through the door received a complete, written breakdown of their available treatment options ,explained clearly enough that, as Dr. Manjunath puts it, "even a layman can easily understand." No deliberate complexity. No manufactured urgency. Just the facts, laid out with enough respect for the patient to let them make an informed decision.

The second was financial transparency. Total treatment costs were agreed upon and signed before a single procedure began. In a sector notorious for bills that bear little resemblance to initial estimates, this was not a minor operational detail. It was a statement of intent.

The third was what he calls "clear-cut expectations" ,honest conversations about what any given treatment cycle could realistically achieve, grounded in data rather than hope. And the data, it turned out, was something to be proud of. A single IVF cycle at Baby Science delivered success rates of 65–70%. Over two cycles, that figure rose to 85%. Over three, to 94% ,numbers that sit comfortably alongside the world's leading fertility programmes.

Here is the business insight hiding in plain sight: when patients know what to expect, when the bill matches the quote, and when the science is explained rather than obscured, they are less anxious, more compliant, and more likely to complete their treatment. Transparency, it turns out, is not the enemy of commercial success. It is, quietly and powerfully, one of its greatest drivers.

Growing Without Selling Your Soul

None of this was easy. Dr. Manjunath is candid about that.

The Indian fertility sector has, in recent years, attracted serious capital and even more serious marketing budgets. Well-funded chains with national footprints spend aggressively on digital advertising, brand campaigns, and the kind of visibility that makes a clinic feel inevitable to someone typing "IVF near me" at midnight. Competing in that environment ,with a model built on substance over spectacle ,required a particular kind of resolve.

"Financial crunch and the stiff competition from heavy marketing," is how he describes the central challenge of those years. It is a characteristically understated summary of what was, in practice, a daily argument for patience over volume. Every rupee not spent on a billboard was a bet that outcomes and reputation would eventually speak louder. That is a bet that takes nerve to place ,and time to pay off.

Meanwhile, he was playing a longer game entirely. He trained over 750 gynaecologists across India in infertility management and gynaecological laparoscopy. He ran free fertility workshops not just across India but in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh. He published clinical research, mentored peers, and stayed close to the frontier of reproductive science ,including advanced work in regenerative medicine and mild ovarian stimulation. In 2025, he was awarded first prize at the ISAR national conference. In 2026, he won it again.

These were not PR exercises. They were the compounding returns on a decision to build a career ,and a business ,around genuine expertise rather than the appearance of it.

The Acquisition That Wasn't Really a Goodbye

By 2024, Baby Science IVF had reached 13 centres and over 20,000 IVF cycles. Then came the call that validated everything.

Birla Fertility & IVF ,India's third-largest IVF network and part of the USD 3 billion CK Birla Group ,announced the acquisition of Baby Science's 12 clinics, extending its national footprint into Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, and bringing its total clinic count to 50. The deal was part of a continued investment commitment of over Rs 500 crore.

For Dr. Manjunath, the question was never whether to accept. It was whether the acquiring partner shared his values. The answer, apparently, was yes. "With BabyScience, we have found a like-minded partner who has a similar care model," said Akshat Seth, Vice Chairman of CK Birla Healthcare. In the unsentimental language of M&A, that is a remarkable thing to be said about a founder's life's work.

Dr. Manjunath's own words at the time of the deal were equally telling: "We are excited to join this strong national brand, so that our patients will continue to benefit from the best science in the industry." Not: we are excited about the valuation. Not: we are excited about the liquidity event. We are excited for our patients.

It is a small distinction. It is also everything.

The Next Frontier

Today, as Medical Director at Birla Fertility & IVF's Koramangala centre, Dr. Manjunath operates with the freedom of someone who has already proved his point ,and the restlessness of someone who has spotted the next problem to solve.

That problem is ovarian longevity. Increasingly, he is seeing younger women present with diminished ovarian reserve ,a condition that not only compromises their ability to conceive but, at a population level, contributes to the quiet crisis of India's declining total fertility rate. It is a clinical pattern with demographic consequences, and Dr. Manjunath is planning dedicated research to address it.

"Longevity of the ovary, within the ambit of overall longevity, is the next highly debated area of research," he says. "A significant number of women are presenting with low egg reserves at younger ages ,which is very detrimental to conceiving and could, in the long run, be a major cause in declining India's TFR and overall population."

It is, once again, the widest possible view from the smallest possible room ,a consultation in Koramangala, connected to a question that concerns the future of a nation. That instinct ,to see the systemic problem inside the individual case, and to build something to address it ,is what made Baby Science IVF what it became.

Whatever Dr. Manjunath CS builds next, it would be unwise to bet against him.

Dr. Manjunath CS is Medical Director at Birla Fertility & IVF, Koramangala, Bengaluru. Over a career spanning nearly two decades, he has overseen more than 20,000 IVF cycles, trained over 750 gynaecologists, and received consecutive first-prize recognition at the ISAR national conference in 2025 and 2026.