Fertility startup Alife Health announced on Tuesday, March 22, that it had raised $22 million in Series A money to help fund its artificial intelligence in vitro fertilization tool. According to Fierce Healthcare, the latest funding will support the company's goal of conducting clinical studies for products still in development and bringing its fertility products to market; particularly its fertility AI tools.
Lux Capital, Maveron, and Union Square Ventures led the new round of funding for the San Francisco-based startup. The news comes roughly a year after Alife Health closed a $9.5 million seed funding round, which Lux Capital also led.
Maveron's Anarghya Vardhana and Union Square's Rebecca Kaden will join Alife Health's board of directors as part of the new deal. Vardhana said she had been on the lookout for a company aiming to meaningfully move the needle in IVF and found it with Alife.
Alife Health hopes to make fertility care more accessible
Paxton Maeder-York, founder and CEO of Alife, issued a statement regarding the company's new funding, saying, "Artificial intelligence has tremendous potential to impact the effectiveness and equity of fertility care."
Maeder-York added that their AI software uses one of the world's largest and most diverse IVF datasets to analyze millions of data points from patient cycles. According to Maeder-York, Alife provides insights on what treatment has worked best for patients in the past, and a fertility clinician can then use the report that it shared to craft a personalized, data-driven treatment plan.
According to a report by Vator, Maeder-York also said that their goal is to enhance clinicians' expertise with machine learning and help them improve fertility outcomes. Alife also hopes to make AI-powered fertility care accessible for everyone in the near future.
Undergoing in vitro fertilization is not cheap. A single IVF cycle in the United States will cost a patient around $12,000, and that price can soar to up to $25,000 with medication. Most parents also undergo multiple IVF cycles to have a baby, given that the success rate of a single cycle is just close to 30 percent.
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Alife Health lining up fertility AI tools for patients
Alife's first product, the Stim Assist, helps clinicians in their decision-making during ovarian stimulations. According to MobiHealthNews, the patient receives injected medications during this stage to induce their ovaries to produce mature eggs. Once this part is successful, clinicians will remove them from the uterus, fertilize the eggs and reimplant them back to the patient.
This particular fertility AI tool provides clinicians with insights to use just the correct dose of medication to extract the maximum number of mature eggs per cycle from the patient and, in the process, lower medication costs.
Alife Health is also planning the release of a patient platform in the latter stages of this year with treatment management tools and educational resources for appointments, medication reminders, and lab results.
The startup's third product, which is currently planning clinical trials, uses AI to analyze patient embryos to help embryologists determine which they will prioritize for transfer.
Women's health startups are attracting huge money right now. They raked $1.3 billion in venture funding in the first eight months of 2021.
