Dr. Asima Ahmad on Carrot Fertility

Sathvik Bilakanti: Asima, you were practicing as a reproductive endocrinologist. What made you start a company?

Dr. Asima Ahmad: I kept seeing the same conversation in clinic. A patient would finally reach me after years of trying, and the first real barrier was not medical, it was financial and logistical. They did not know what their coverage included, they had already spent out of pocket on the wrong things, and they had lost time. You can only fix so much of that one patient at a time.

Sathvik Bilakanti: Why had employers ignored fertility for so long?

Dr. Asima Ahmad: It was treated as elective, which was never clinically accurate, and it was seen as a small population. Both assumptions were wrong. Infertility affects roughly one in six people of reproductive age, and the people affected are often exactly the employees companies work hardest to retain. Once you frame it as retention and equity rather than a perk, the buying conversation changes completely.

Sathvik Bilakanti: Carrot is bought by HR but delivered clinically. How do you keep quality from getting compromised by that split?

Dr. Asima Ahmad: We built the clinical function as a first class part of the product rather than a review layer bolted on afterward. Our care navigation, our provider criteria, and our education content all come out of the same clinical team. We publish outcomes internally and we are willing to steer a member away from a treatment that is not indicated, even when the member is asking for it, because the alternative is spending someone's money and hope on the wrong thing.

Sathvik Bilakanti: You operate in more than a hundred countries. How do you build a network at that scale?

Dr. Asima Ahmad: Slowly and locally. Regulations around fertility, surrogacy, and adoption differ enormously by country, so the product cannot be one policy translated into forty languages. We hire people with regional expertise, we vet clinics against a consistent clinical standard, and we accept that the member journey looks different in Tokyo than it does in Chicago.

Sathvik Bilakanti: What do clinician founders underestimate?

Dr. Asima Ahmad: Distribution. Clinicians are trained to believe the best clinical answer wins, and in a company the best answer still has to be sold, implemented, and supported. I had to learn the enterprise sales cycle, the implementation timeline, and how a benefits leader is evaluated. That work is not a distraction from the clinical mission, it is how the clinical mission reaches anyone.

Sathvik Bilakanti: Where does this category go next?

Dr. Asima Ahmad: Toward the full arc of reproductive and hormonal health rather than one procedure. Preconception, pregnancy, postpartum, low testosterone, menopause. These are connected clinically and they have all been underserved. The companies that treat them as one longitudinal relationship will serve members far better than the ones selling a single episode of care.