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Founders: Liane Hart, Brian Kopp, Scott Baxter, Hadi Shafiee
Established: 2018
Top executives:
- Liane Hart, CEO
- Brian Kopp, chief financial officer
- Hadi Shafiee, inventor and technical adviser
- Scott Baxter, chief product officer
Equity raised: $100,000 pre-seed round, $100,000 seed round, $4 million Series A round
2024 revenue: none
Projected 2025 revenue: none
Employees: 4
Location: Maxwell
Affiliations: Purdue Ag-Celerator, Gener8tor gBETA Agbioscience accelerator
Patents: patents issued in the field of semen analysis and ovulation detection for both veterinary and human use across the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia
What does the company do? Verility has developed a low-cost, mobile fertility diagnostic tool for livestock breeding. The company’s AI-driven, handheld platform—called Fertile-Eyez—pinpoints optimal breeding windows in real time, which the company said reduces failed inseminations, cuts costs and boosts herd productivity.
What problem is it trying to solve? Livestock breeding is a complex biological process that can have much variability, said CEO Liane Hart. “Not only can it be influenced by external factors, but it can also have detection challenges since not all ways to track ovulation are accessible, affordable or accurate—and some can be downright invasive,” she said. “The traditional way to determine which animals to inseminate and when has been done the same way for decades, whereas our work has validated the use of pioneering technology and data to make the process simpler, faster, and more efficient and profitable for breeders and producers.”
Latest news: Verility in March released the results of a study of 400 sows, which validated that sow insemination protocols using the Fertile-Eyez technology delivered comparable pregnancy and embryo rates to traditional breeding protocols while requiring fewer semen doses, heat tests and boar exposure days.
Why Verility made the list: The Fertile-Eyez platform is adapted from technology developed at Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where Verility’s technical adviser, Hadi Shafiee, heads the Shafiee Lab and is a Brigham and Women’s Hospital faculty member.•
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