I’m 38 years old. Of all my friends, only one has a child, a little boy. So if I had to lay a bet, I’d say our generation is going to use a lot of IVF.

A fascinating startup called Alife might make that process a lot easier.

How AI Is Helping Families Grow

Alife uses AI to improve the success rate of IVF. Alife tells the doctor which embryos are most likely to produce a healthy baby, calculates optimal medication dosage per patient, and a lot more. From Fortune:

Alife’s suite of AI-enabled tools is designed to cover every step of the fertility process. Its Stim Assist tool uses a machine-learning algorithm trained on 40,000 cycles to analyze a woman’s data. It then delivers recommendations, such as the dosage of Follicle-Stimulating Hormone (FSH) a woman should take to optimize the number of healthy eggs before a retrieval cycle, and predicts the best day for retrieval. The idea is, by relying on the data and finding what worked for a similar patient, women can potentially save money on medicine and unnecessary future rounds.

IVF is expensive, time-consuming and often fails. A cycle costs around $23,000 on average. Many women require numerous cycles in order to deliver a baby.

All in, it could cost $50,000, $100,000 or more to start a family. How many families can afford this?

Making IVF Cheaper and More Effective

If we could improve the success rate of each IVF cycle, we’d drive down costs dramatically. That’s where Alife’s approach makes a lot of sense.

Alife has a giant data set of IVF cycles. It can tag each cycle with metadata, like “resulted in pregnancy” or “mother over 35.”

Once the Alife models have enough training data, they should be able to tell which embryos give the woman the best chance of pregnancy.

Today, Alife has 40,000 IVF cycles to train on. What happens when it has 40 million?

Worldwide, women are having kids older. At the same time, people are getting richer.

That’s the target market for IVF. So I expect that the available datasets will grow enormously in the coming years.

Eventually, Alife may be able to target the right embryo, med dosing, and retrieval day with incredible precision. That could mean women need fewer IVF cycles in order to get pregnant, which would drastically lower costs.

Wrap-Up

Cheaper, more effective IVF means more babies. And in a nation with a fertility rate of just 1.7 children per woman, that would be wonderful news!

In my work investing in startups, I’ve seen a ton of AI sales tools and coding assistants. I love those — super useful!

But I think AI will impact every part of our lives, not just our work. Massive amounts of intelligence crunching giant data sets should be able to solve just about any problem on earth.

What do you think families will look like in the future? Leave a comment and let us know!

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