Read the Conversation
Conversation highlights:
- Building a scalable IVF model: Founded to solve the fragmentation and talent bottlenecks that keep fertility care out of reach for many, Conceivable Life Sciences is combining clinical expertise, precision robotics, and AI with the aim of delivering consistent, superior outcomes at scale.
- AURA, the world's first AI-powered automated IVF lab: is designed to assist over 200 manual steps with robotics, advanced optics, and AI, enabling three scientists to do the work of fifteen while designed to perform with the consistency of the world's best embryologists.
- A global team built for a global problem: With R&D operations spanning New York, the UK, Spain, and Mexico, Conceivable has assembled the clinical expertise, engineering depth, and direct lab access required to build at this level of precision and scale.
- Following initial clinical proof-of-concept, and with ongoing validation underway: including the world's first babies conceived using human-assisted AI-powered automation, Conceivable is preparing to enter the U.S. with a clinical partner in 2027.
- Long-term vision: impact and ecosystem building: Beyond growth, the company is creating a new standard of care to reshape fertility globally while fostering local talent, ownership, and a new generation of health-tech entrepreneurs.
- Infrastructure for the defining demographic challenge of our era: Birth rates across advanced economies are well below replacement. Accessible IVF at scale is one of the most direct levers available to address that decline, and Conceivable is building the infrastructure to make it possible.
- Conceivable has received coverage and recognition: from Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, Edison Awards, Reproductive Biomedicine Online, and World Fertility Awards.
EF: What opportunities did you identify in the market, and what mission did you set for yourself when you founded Conceivable?
AC: Scale with quality. I'm a fertility doctor. I opened my first IVF clinic in Guadalajara in 2009, a second in Mexico City in 2014, and quickly ran into the same wall every fertility doctor hits. The talent required to do this well simply doesn't scale. Assembling a team of capable embryologists, scientists who are reliable, highly skilled, and consistent, is extraordinarily difficult. And even when you find them, IVF in its current form is concentrated, inaccessible, and expensive. In Mexico City, 80–90% of fertility clinics are clustered in just two neighborhoods. Patients travel far, pay a great deal, and still face wildly inconsistent outcomes, because everything depends on one superstar embryologist on a good day.
The hardest part of this work isn't technical. It's calling a patient to say she's not pregnant and not fully understanding why. That feeling, repeated enough times, stops being frustrating and starts being unacceptable. I became convinced the answer wasn't more clinics or more embryologists. It was rethinking the lab entirely.
I spent years building AI tools for embryo selection, the first system to predict an embryo's genetic component, then tools for sperm selection and egg evaluation. But isolated tools weren't the answer either. Real transformation requires end-to-end integration of the entire IVF lab.
Then I met Alan Murray and Joshua Abram, who were building robotics to automate cell storage. Our visions aligned immediately. They had the engineering platform; I had the clinical intelligence and the AI. Together, we saw something neither of us could build alone: a fully automated IVF lab capable of operating at a scale the world has never seen and accessible enough to reach the millions of families who need it. That became Conceivable, and that dual ambition, helping individual families and addressing the broader fertility crisis, has been the mission from the start.
EF: In terms of health tech startups, what are two accomplishments of the Mexican healthcare Life Sciences ecosystem during the past ten years, and what objective should we want to reach over the next five years?
AC: Guadalajara's technology ecosystem is one of the most underappreciated stories in global health tech. Over the past decade, two things stand out. First, the deliberate choice by major global technology companies to base engineering and development, not just manufacturing, in Guadalajara. That decision reshaped what universities train for and what ambition looks like for a generation of engineers. Second, and perhaps more consequential, is the culture of return. The brightest engineers and scientists I know pursued advanced degrees abroad and came back, not because they had to, but because they saw the opportunity here as exceptional. That pull is rare, and it compounds over time.
What I hope for over the next five years is less about a single milestone and more about conditions: sustained investment in education, a legal and tax framework that attracts private capital, and real alignment between government and founders on a long-term vision. Most entrepreneurs aren't asking for much, just for priorities to be coherent and consistent.
On a professional level, if I could define a single metric for my life's work, it would be for millions of babies to be born through our technology.
At Conceivable, we've tried to build something that reflects this philosophy from the inside out. Every employee is a shareholder. We recruit young engineers and want them to understand that they are not just investing their time and ideas, they are investing in their own future. When we succeed, Guadalajara will have a generation of engineers who have built something real, who have capital, networks, and the confidence to find their own ventures. Multiply that by a handful of companies, and you have something transformative, a critical mass of builders who know how to create within the system and are willing to bet on what comes next. That, to me, is the real long-term objective.
EF: How do you think about attracting investment at this stage, and what does the path forward look like for Conceivable?
AC: After nearly five years of prior research and development, we've been rigorous about proving every stage before moving to the next. To date, we've raised $70 million across our Seed and Series A rounds, and every dollar has gone toward one objective: demonstrating that the entire IVF process can be automated at clinical quality.
We started with proof of concept work using animal cells, in partnership with a leading experimental embryologist in Barcelona. From that foundation, we ran our first human study: 42 enrolled patients and 19 healthy babies born. It was the first time in history that babies were conceived using AI powered automation to assist embryologists in the IVF lab.
That proof of concept gave us the confidence to build at scale. AURA, the world’s first AI powered automated IVF lab, is designed to perform up to 2,000 cycles per year, always with an embryologist overseeing it, yet requiring only three scientists, where a conventional lab would need 15. We then subjected the scaled system to the same rigorous validation through a 150 patient pilot currently underway.
We’ve already seen healthy births from our initial 42 patient study, and the first clinical pregnancies are now emerging from the ongoing pilot. The first AURA lab is scheduled to begin clinical validation in the US early next year, with Europe and the Gulf Region following in 2028.
We’ll be going out for a Series B in approximately eighteen months, once we have a US lab in early clinical operations, and we’re looking for investors who understand both the scale of the market opportunity and the demographic urgency driving it. This isn’t just a compelling health tech investment, it’s infrastructure for a problem that advanced economies cannot afford to ignore.
As for exit, the honest answer is that we’re focused first on building something category defining. When you become the global standard of care for IVF, we believe the outcomes will follow.
EF: How would you rate the degree of AI technology adoption or absorption in the global market?
AC: When we first introduced AI into IVF seven or eight years ago, many people thought I was being unrealistic. The widespread adoption of tools like ChatGPT has since transformed that perception entirely. In that sense, using robotics to automate procedures is a natural extension of what we now understand AI can do: execute complex, precision tasks with a consistency that human hands simply cannot match at scale.
There is a global shortage of embryologists, and our intention has always been to use technology to amplify their impact, not replace them. AURA is designed with the embryologist at the center; a human is always in the loop, making the critical decisions that require clinical judgment. Automation provides precision and consistency, aiming to eliminate the variability that comes with manual processes. AURA doesn’t make embryologists obsolete. It’s extending it with the precision and consistency that manual processes cannot reliably deliver at scale. That is a categorically different proposition from replacing human expertise. The broader question of AI adoption is inseparable from regulation, and that’s where I think the most important conversation is still ahead of us. The danger right now is hype in both directions, either expecting AI to solve everything or dismissing it because it doesn’t fit existing frameworks. Neither serves patients.
From a regulatory standpoint, I believe governments need to be genuinely careful about applying frameworks designed for previous technologies to AI-based systems. Traditional regulation relies heavily on large randomized controlled trials and multicenter studies. That model makes sense for drugs, fixed chemical compositions tested across populations for risk and benefit. AI-based automation is categorically different. By the time a three-year RCT on an AI system is completed, the technology may have evolved substantially. That’s not a reason to lower standards; scientific rigor and robust statistical tools remain essential. But it is a reason to develop new methodologies that are appropriate to what these systems actually are. A cautiously flexible approach isn’t a compromise. It’s a prerequisite for responsible adoption of technologies that are genuinely moving faster than traditional frameworks were designed to handle.
EF: Beyond individual families, do you see automated IVF playing a meaningful role in addressing declining birth rates?
AC: The data makes it hard to look away. The U.S. fertility rate is 1.6, roughly 700,000 births short of replacement every year. Europe is worse. These aren't abstractions; they represent an economic and social trajectory that advanced economies genuinely cannot sustain, and one that conventional policy interventions have repeatedly failed to reverse.
What's often missed in that conversation is that the problem isn't only that people don't want children. Many families do desperately and simply can't access IVF because of cost or geography. In the
U.S. alone, only about 100,000 IVF babies are born each year. The unmet demand is many times that. If we could reach 350,000 IVF births annually, which the economics of automation suggest may become achievable as the technology scales.
That's not a secondary benefit of what we're building. It was always part of the mission. Helping an individual family and addressing a civilization-scale demographic crisis turn out to be the same work. AURA is the mechanism that connects those two things by making IVF precise enough, affordable enough, and scalable enough to reach the families who need it most.
EF: Do you have any last thoughts for our readers?
AC: We are living through the most significant moment in the history of reproductive medicine, and possibly one of the most consequential moments in health sciences broadly. The tools available to us now, the convergence of AI, robotics, and clinical expertise, make problems solvable that were simply intractable a decade ago. My message to anyone in this field is the same: choose to build, not just to observe.
At fifty, I feel the urgency of that more than ever. I fully expect to see Conceivable help bring millions of babies into the world, children who are deeply wanted by families who couldn't reach them before. And beyond the individual families, I believe accessible IVF at scale is one of the most direct, meaningful levers we have for addressing the demographic challenge that advanced economies are quietly staring down.
That is what gets me up in the morning. Not the technology for its own sake, but the child at the end of it. The family that is waiting. That's what this is for.
