#StartupsEverywhere: Dr. Cara Wells, Founder, EMGenisys
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Embryonics for the 21st century
Fertility is a critical concern for both humans and the animals we share our world with. Whether addressing the rising rates of human infertility, finding ways to feed the global population more efficiently, or working to save endangered species, Dr. Cara Wells is tackling it all. Through her company, EMGenisys, Dr. Wells is advancing the science of embryonics for the 21st century. We sat down with her to discuss her product, patents, and access to capital.
Tell us about your background. What led you to EMGenisys?
My background is in animal science, specifically in reproductive physiology. As a scientist, I study the reproductive system, focusing on embryos outside the body. Increasingly, families are turning to IVF to start and grow their families. IVF is also a valuable tool in livestock reproduction, as it can improve the genetic makeup of a herd. Traits like feed efficiency and milk production help feed more people with fewer animals; we can propagate those genetics at a greater rate through IVF than we could by just letting nature take its course.
The idea for EMGenesis was born about five years ago now. I noticed a problem: the way that people evaluate embryos of any species hasn't changed in over 40 years. The process relies on an embryologist picking which embryos look okay based on visually apparent characteristics. There had to be a better, more objective analysis, especially considering our state-of-the-art imaging cameras and AI computer vision technologies.
I realized that the phone everyone has in their pocket has the necessary recording technology and computing power to make this concept work. All you need is a microscope, an internet connection, and a mount to secure your phone to the microscope. Position the phone's camera over the microscope’s eyepiece, ensuring the embryo is in view, and capture a 30-second video of the cells. The video is then uploaded to our web-based platform, where our software processes it and analyzes the embryos for the user.
We started with an animal livestock model because there is a strong customer base in agriculture. There are no regulatory barriers, and my co-founder gave us access to big data. But we are working for this with animals and humans in mind. The project, product, and company have grown since its inception.
What is the work you all are doing at EMGenisys?
We believe in noninvasive embryo evaluation. We're trying to give people better information to make decisions, improve their chances of a viable pregnancy, and reduce the failed attempts that, unfortunately, we see way too often.
Embryos are going through really rapid, frequent changes. Their cells are dividing and differentiating into different cell types. They go from a one-cell zygote to a living, breathing baby in less than a year in most mammalian species. These changes cannot be meaningfully observed by the human eye using a microscope.
Our product captures these activities from video data and analyzes them with an image processing technique to quantify differences from frame to frame. This allows us to see how much that embryo is changing. Fast and slow-changing embryos are deficient, and moderate embryos are good. The fast ones are burning through their energy, and the slow ones are already on their way out. Our program quantifies the activity in those cells and gives the user a probability score for each embryo resulting in a viable pregnancy.
Can you tell us more about your funding journey? Were there any barriers?
In the spring of 2021, we started applying for pitch competitions which served as our source of early funding. We were able to bootstrap our company with that money for about four years, until very recently. We did win some other non-dilutive grants, and some of the team, including myself, put our money into the company.
But being a bootstrapped company wasn't by design. We wanted enough money to get us further down the road. Legal costs for startups are prohibitive but unavoidable for startups seeking venture capital, so until recently, we weren’t able to go down that route.
In 2024, we ran out of money. So, we opened our first seed round and raised $1.5 million. We connected with our lead investor, an ag-tech venture capital firm based in Nebraska. I hadn’t initially considered Nebraska as a hub for venture capital, but they’ve proven to be both smart and sophisticated. Their thesis is compelling: since agriculture happens in the heart of the country, the funding should come from there as well.
After closing that round, we then got our product on the market for use in cattle. Now, we’re working on collecting data for human IVF. Infertility rates are on the rise.
The WHO declared infertility a disease in 2009, and that shifted some funding towards women's health and infertility, but not a lot. It's getting better, but I've heard time and time again from investors and doctors that IVF is still a niche industry. Startups need a platform to have their ideas and voices heard to attract the funding we need to make our ideas all come to life.
Do your users face connectivity or broadband issues when working in rural areas?
Everything that we do is hosted on AWS. They make it easy to connect to the Internet in different areas. Times change quickly. When we first started, broadband access was a huge issue. Although Internet access in IVF labs has never been a problem, remote beef ranches are where the connection is not quite as good. We had one of our customers install Starlink equipment on his truck so he could secure a wireless connection and use our product wherever he was. I think satellite Internet services like Starlink are a game changer that give rural America more access to any type of technology that they need on the ranch or farm.
Did you face any challenges in obtaining your patents?
We were in the right place and time when we filed our patents. It seems obvious now, but at that time, no one had looked at real-time video of embryos. EMGenisys now has 13 issued US patents. We have so many patents because we think that, eventually, there will be different exit and acquisition opportunities for animal health versus human health.
Our patent attorney filed a Track One application to prioritize the examination of our patents. Our applications were issued quickly, even though some were filed less than two years ago. It was more expensive, but it got us to the front of the line. Being a software company, we don't have many assets, so when it comes to our equity, a lot is tied to those patents because those are our real, tangible assets.
How did access to machine learning talent impact the development of your technology?
Accessing the right talent on our budget was one of our most challenging problems as a startup. It took us seven machine learning engineers to get our product working. Making sure the analysis was data efficient and quick on processing time was the technical hurdle we had to overcome. Being a startup on a shoestring budget, we went through a couple of student machine learning engineers, and then we got money for more professional ones. Still, some of them flopped as well. It took a lot of iterations to find a machine learning engineer. Off-the-shelf models did not work for us. We needed to hire someone with experience developing custom models for us in-house because most of the off-the-shelf models are looking at still images and not the relationship of each image to each other. Getting a machine learning analysis to go through the entire video sequence and teaching it how those frames interact was probably our biggest machine learning challenge.
What are your goals for EMGenisys moving forward?
I love being a startup founder because it allows me to explore so many cutting-edge technologies. I’m also excited about the opportunity to expand our product into markets beyond livestock. We’re expanding to human IVF, and working in animal conservation is a passion project. Our technology has been used on both northern and southern white rhinos. Saving these species is worth it, and if the people doing amazing things in animal and human reproduction are given the support they need, we will make human, animal, and environmental health more robust and sustainable for everyone.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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