A process that is mostly paperwork
Surrogacy is a medical process wrapped in a legal one, and most of the hours in the legal one are paperwork. There is a contract between the intended parents and the woman who carries the pregnancy, and the standard in the field, and in some states the law, is that each side has its own lawyer. There is money held in escrow and paid out on a schedule. There is a court filing so that the intended parents are the legal parents and the birth certificate says so, and in some states that order can be granted before the birth. There are clinics, insurers, escrow agents and courts, and none of them share a calendar.
The law changes at every state line. What the contract has to say, when it has to be signed, who needs a lawyer, which court hears the parentage petition and whether it will hear it before the birth are all set state by state, and sometimes county by county. It is a packet, it has a checklist, and the checklist is different in the next jurisdiction.
The largest costs in surrogacy are the surrogate's compensation and the medicine, and neither is where a startup should go looking for savings. What sits around them is where the waste is: coordination between people who do not talk to each other, and legal hours spent assembling documents rather than exercising judgment. The startup wanted to lower the cost of surrogacy and IVF for the people paying it. What it needed was to know which of those costs it could honestly touch.