Tanner Kohara and his wife Erin learned firsthand how difficult fertility treatments can be. After it took them four years to conceive their second child, Kohara quit his finance job and with “nothing but a slide deck and a dream,” he and two co-founders who shared his vision for a better patient experience opened the first Twig Fertility clinic and lab in midtown Toronto. 

The founders put their own money into last year’s launch, with investment from friends, family and $250,000 in seed money from Well Health Technologies. But to make Twig a Canada-wide chain, they needed more. After conversations with more conventional would-be backers—institutional investors, family offices and the like—Twig found a match in an unexpected place: venture capital.