In this episode, we meet Paxton Maeder-York, CEO and Founder of Alife Health. Alife Health’s mission is to improve the efficacy and affordability of IVF through artificial intelligence. Founded in 2020, Alife recently raised a $9.5M seed round, led by Lux Capital.

Founded in 2020, Alife recently raised a $9.5M seed round, led by Lux Capital. Other investment firms include Amplo, IA Ventures and Springbank Collective, as well as angel investors such as Anne Wojcicki, the founder and CEO of 23andMe; Fred Moll, the founder of Intuitive Surgical and Auris; and Amira Yahyaoui, the founder of Mos and Sequoia Scout.

Paxton Maeder-York started his career building surgical robots to fight lung cancer at Auris Health, which sold to Johnson & Johnson for $3.4 billion in 2019 and holds a bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering and a Master’s in Data Science and an MBA from Harvard University.

In this episode, Paxton and I chat about:

• Broader trends and innovation in the fertility space to serve the 1 in 8 couples who face infertility challenges today
• How Alife’s technology works to improve each step of the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process to improve clinical efficacy and access, and reduce cost (less IVF cycles = less cost) for patients
• The early partnership structures Alife established to obtain access to large sets of embryo data to enable algorithm development
• The FDA’s approach to regulating AI algorithms in healthcare
• Paxton’s reflections on the recent capital infusion, the road ahead and entrepreneurship