Alife Health, the fertility technology company building artificial intelligence tools to advance in-vitro fertilization (IVF), announced today it has raised $22 million in Series A financing co-led by existing Seed lead Deena Shakir at Lux Capital, and new investors Rebecca Kaden at Union Square Ventures and Anarghya Vardhana at Maveron, both of whom will also be joining Alife's Board of Directors. Alife's mission is to enhance IVF clinical decision-making with personalized, data-driven patient insights, ultimately helping clinicians maximize each patient's chances of success while lowering costs and barriers to access. Today, the 180 million people around the world who struggle with infertility face treatment options that are both expensive and inaccessible. The average IVF cycle can cost up to $25,000 in the U.S., and patients typically go through 3 to 5 cycles to have a baby. Successful pregnancies from IVF rely on a complex set of clinical decisions to deliver the optimal care for each patient.

Today, 1 in 8 couples struggle with infertility, and the treatment options they have access to are both expensive, as well as inaccessible: according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, in-vitro fertilization cycles can cost anywhere from $12,000 to $17,000, and that doesn't include medication; when medication is added in, the cost can be double to around $25,000. And many patients don't just go through one cycle, but three to five cycles on average in order to have a successful pregnancy In order to help break through all of these difficulties, inefficiencies, and barriers to access, Alife Health, which announced a $22 million Series A round of funding on Tuesday, is trying a new approach: artificial intelligence. "We believe AI has tremendous potential to impact the effectiveness and equity of fertility care," said Paxton Maeder-York, Alife's CEO and founder. "Our team has worked tirelessly to construct one of the largest and most diverse IVF datasets from top fertility clinics around the world." The company's AI uses pattern recognition to analyze this data and determine correlations between treatments and positive outcomes.