Company leader
Khaled Kteily
Founder and CEO
Legacy
Khaled Kteily is founder and chief executive of Legacy, which lets a man test and freeze sperm at home instead of in a clinic collection room. He started it after a burn and a visit to a Cambridge, Massachusetts, sperm bank.
Escaping the 2006 War
He is Palestinian-Lebanese Canadian and grew up between Lebanon and Canada. In 2006, while he was choosing between McGill and the American University of Beirut, war broke out. "My brother and I were smuggled across the border to Syria to in the back of a taxicab and kind of escaped our way to Montreal," he said. He earned a bachelor of commerce from McGill in 2010.
Spilling Four Hot Drinks
After McGill he worked in healthcare consulting at Oliver Wyman, where he read the 700 pages of the Affordable Care Act cover to cover. On a drive to a client site, as the most junior of four consultants, he offered to fetch drinks, and four hot Starbucks teas spilled on his lap and gave him second-degree burns.
A Visit to a Sperm Bank
He then went to study public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, where a classmate explained that he had frozen his sperm before chemotherapy. "Can anyone do this? Do I need permission?" Kteily asked him. He went to a sperm bank in Cambridge, next to the Dumpling House, was quizzed about his sexual history in the waiting room, and was sent to a dark collection room. "Everything about that experience was so dehumanizing for someone who just wanted to be proactive about their fertility," he said.
Founding Legacy
He set the company up at the Harvard Innovation Labs in May 2018, won TechCrunch Battlefield, and went through Y Combinator in 2019. "Sperm counts have gone down 50 to 60% over the last 40 years," he said in 2020. FirstMark Capital led a $10 million Series A in April 2021, and Bain Capital Ventures led a $25 million round in 2022 that brought total funding past $45 million. Legacy also works with the Veterans Health Administration on male infertility among veterans.