Concept

New clinical models, digital health models, and biology for tackling family planning will enable multiple venture scale businesses to emerge.

Longer Description

More novel care models, advanced technology, and advancements in biotech have meant that we have better tools to align societal shifts with biology in order to allow more freedom and opportunity in the family planning process.

We began investing against this thesis with Tia, a women’s healthcare company, as we saw that women weren’t often building lasting relationships with their doctors until childbirth and that a new care model could provide better outcomes.

We have since made multiple investments in the space from digital health through biotech. We believe there are likely other investments to be made still in areas related to female fertility, male fertility, as well as adjacently menopause, among others.

Investments include:

• Tia
  • We co-led Tia’s seed round and have seen the company materially scale over the past few years. The core learnings for Tia have been that impacting outcomes often requires a more hands-on or clinical approach, as well as that novel care models are what create venture outcomes for businesses in the arena. We believe Tia is one of the most important companies in women’s health broadly (we are aware women’s health ≠ family planning entirely).
• Imvitro
  • We had been following the fertility world for some time now base on our investment in Tia and past thoughts on the space as mentioned above. More and more research was being done surrounding embryology broadly, and Cornell put out a brekathrough paper about deep learning applied to embryo selection with other research showing lack of ability for doctors to materially impact outcomes.
  • Related Reading:
    • Researchers test using AI to optimize IVF embryo selectionhttps://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/04/researchers-test-using-ai-optimize-ivfembryo-selection
    • Using Deep Learning with Large Dataset of Microscope Images to Develop an Automated Embryo Grading System -** https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S2661318219500051
    • Deep learning as a predictive tool for fetal heart pregnancy following time-lapse incubation and blastocyst transfer. -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31111884
    • High accuracy machine learning predictive model for embryo selection in IVF PGT cycles with single embryo transfers - https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015- 0282(18)31630-3/fulltext*
• Ovid Research/Conception
  • Our investment in Ovid highlights the type of businesses we love, which are led by founders who see scientific change happening around the world and then aim to more rapidly advance and commercialize the technology.
• Clear Genetics (acq by Invitae)
  • We have a strong thesis that scaling practioners utilizing mobile and AI/ML would be a core value prop across multiple areas of supply-constrained healthcare. We had seen this play out in Talkspace and made adjacent investments in companies like Clear Genetics as well as Lune and Onward (both dissolutions).
  • We have felt for some time that secondarily, more precise care will be demanded by patients in developed nations across all modalities (this also relates to some current areas we're looking to invest in) and the pre-natal and post-natal genetic counseling was a clear next area for this to happen. The company was sold to Invitae in December 2019

Other Thoughts

• We are increasingly dubious of outcome shifts from care being digital only. However, we believe strongly that data and adjustments can come from digital only products.
• Our investment in Tia precludes us from a variety of women’s health investments, though we largely believe horizontal models work best in healthcare.

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