A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
Good morning. As someone who has been through two rounds of IVF, this week’s founder story is extra special.
There are so many inefficiencies, expenses and uncertainties in IVF that this female founder is trying to fix. All of the co-founders are either ex-patients or family members of IVF babies.
I can’t think of a more intimate field to build in than fertility.
Let’s dive in.
This week in AI:
TIME names ‘Architects of AI’ its Person of the Year
Not one person, but a whole group of AI CEOs.
Researchers have developed an AI-driven workflow where a robotic arm creates products from an input.
Disney x OpenAI landmark $1B agreement
Users will be able to generate AI videos with over 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters.
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Company background: Alife
Founded: August 2020
Team size: 9
Funding to date: $22 million Series A
ARR: Not disclosed
Growth metric: 15% of all U.S. IVF cycles are currently going through Alife’s platform. Alife is in 46 clinics across six countries, and rapidly growing.
How this female founder is bringing AI innovation to IVF
As a biomedical engineer and systems engineer, Melissa Teran loved the intersection of technology and healthcare. She started her career at a surgical robotics company, working to improve the placement of implants for orthopedic surgical procedures. It was here where Teran fell in love with complex medical device design innovations.
When they were acquired by a Fortune 500 company for $1.6 billion, Teran got headhunted to California to work on a robot to drive into the lung to better biopsy for lung cancer. It was here where she honed her skills in user experience and design, and working with physicians and end users.
They took the company from zero to commercial in four years, then it was acquired by Johnson and Johnson for $3.4 billion. Teran did a stint at J&J for a year but didn’t want to stay at a large company too long, knowing she missed the start-up world.
This was right around Covid and Teran started going through egg freezing.
“My other co-founder’s brother was an IVF baby, so we started having conversations around our skillsets and this run in with fertility a lot of us were having,” Teran said.
With their backgrounds in medical devices and clinical application design, plus their personal experiences with fertility, they realized they could help enhance the outcomes for patients.
With a single IVF cycle running upwards of $25,000, it’s a field that’s desperate for disruption. Just ask any IVF patient.
And Alife was born.
The product build & validation
Alife is a platform of tools for IVF clinics. “You can think of it almost like Adobe Cloud, with different applications able to be used by the physician or embryologist through each of the major steps of the IVF process,” Teran said.
There’s Alife’s flagship product, Embryo Assist, which analyzes a cohort of embryos, ranks them, and gives each an AI score of the likelihood of an embryo leading to a pregnancy. “There’s an immense amount of human variability and subjectivity in assessing embryos under a microscope. Different labs use different grading systems, meaning there isn’t a universal process that everyone applies,” she explained.
Teran said this was a clear use case for AI with its imaging models and deep learning models.
Alife’s stim AI tool is another solution, which helps reproductive doctors select the optimal medication dosage for stimulation. “One of the things we did was build a huge IVF dataset by partnering with centers of excellence and academic centers across the U.S. and Europe. We have one of the most diverse datasets of IVF in the world. We were able to assess patterns and propensity match patients, which means we’re matching them to hundreds of thousands of other patients, just like them.”
This helps to better predict dosage to avoid under or over stimulating. “We’re able to decrease medication costs by an average of $1,000 in out-of-pocket costs for patients.” This is huge, given meds for an IVF cycle can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $8,000.
In terms of market validation, Teran said they did an immense amount of work to understand the data, the clinical workflow, build the early prototypes, and fine tune the value proposition with pilot tests with key customers. They tackled market-fit first, investing in key relationships with clinics and publishing data to scientific publications. “Clinical scientific excellence is essential in any medical space. The clinical community needs to understand it and see that it's proven. There’s a high clinical burden of proof, and rightfully so.”
Making sure Alife seamlessly integrated into the clinical workflow was also critical. “We try to add layers of efficiency into our products, so that there’s even more ROI for practices.”
Teran said Alife only switched on commercialization this year.
Acquiring customers
Alife got a contract with the largest network chain of fertility clinics in the country, US Fertility. “We’ve rolled out across the majority of their network and we’re hoping to finish in Q1. We’ve also rolled out to clinics in Mexico and just launched in Europe.”
15% of all U.S. IVF cycles are currently going through Alife’s platform. Alife is in 46 clinics across six countries, and rapidly growing.
Commercializing a clinical product, not a consumer product, is a different playbook.
Teran explained how there’s not a large amount of social or marketing channels available. A lot of it is word of mouth and relationships. E.g. Leveraging extended partner networks such as the doctors that their clinics might know.
Other methods include going to scientific congresses and meetings where the team knows people so they can get an exhibit or booth, going door-to-door visiting clinics, or getting on Zoom calls doing founder-led demos.
“It’s a smaller industry, so a lot of this is just working the relationships and getting in front of the right people.”
A part of Alife’s strategy for 2026 is going abroad into Europe to get more market share in different geographies.
Teran predicts we’ll see robotic automation along with AI in the next 5-10 years.
Takeaways
You have to be flexible and nimble in your execution, but unwavering in your mission. Business isn’t a linear trajectory.
It’s helpful to have first-person experience, especially in healthcare. It gives you additional perspective and motivation to weather the storm.
Some industries (like healthcare) move a little slower. You can’t always be so dynamic. But this allows you to really understand where to apply the AI, so it has the most benefit.
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