Video Transcription
Michel Bielecki & Jeyla Sadikova 00:02
Hi everyone. We're Illumicell AI, and we are on a mission to democratize access to fertility care. You've probably seen those headlines. Fertility is a global issue. It's been on a decline for the last few decades. Some would even call it a spermpocalypse. One in six couples worldwide is struggling with fertility issues. It's a $35 billion market with an 8% annual growth, but a lesser-known fact is that men contribute to half of the infertility issues. In fact, sperm testing is one of the poorly performed diagnostic tests in medicine. That's not our opinion. That's a statement from Professor De Laurence Lam from Weill Cornell. She spent her whole life in sperm testing and is one of the main authors for WHO sperm testing guidelines and one of our advisors. But why is it so poorly performed? The truth is that the standard of care is costly, time-consuming, and inaccessible. Most fertility clinics rely completely on manual labor, which means they require specialized lab equipment and people who are highly trained to perform the testing. And as a consequence, it takes 45 minutes to analyze a single sample. Currently, you have three groups of doctors who are referring tests to only 550 fertility clinics. In the United States, there is a demand of around 10 million tests per year, but only 2 million tests are getting performed. The clinical need is currently outnumbering the supply by a factor of 5x, and we're changing that with a system comprising two technologies. One is our proprietary digital visualization technology, which has no moving parts, has extremely low complexity, does not require any calibration, and is cost-efficient. We're combining that with state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms capable of analyzing all key sperm parameters with a 98% accuracy, but 50 times faster than the standard of care and over 20 times cheaper. So the cool thing about our tech is we are achieving a 1.1-micrometer resolution, which is equivalent to the state-of-the-art microscopy at a similar magnification, but without any of the complexity that a microscope in a lab setting would have. We have no moving parts. Again, no calibration required. It's plug and play. A nurse can operate it; it's lightweight, portable, and cost-effective. Just a demo. On the left side, you see our sperm motility algorithm, something that physicians get very excited about because it allows for single-cell tracking and also for pharmaceutical companies to see whether interventions might be working. On the left side, we have our concentration module, and we have a few more that we're not showing. Really, just to recapitulate, the way it works is quite simply, you have a standard microscopic slide that you would find in any physician's office or clinic. You put it into this scanner, close it, press a button. It's doing a 3D visualization of the images. We are putting this into our machine learning algorithms and are able to quantify all key sperm parameters and integrate that into the EHR system of physicians.
Michel Bielecki & Jeyla Sadikova 03:10
So really, this eliminates the bottlenecks associated with traditional testing. So what we showed you before is no more, and we're bringing for the first time lab-grade diagnostics to every single doctor that needs to test sperm, completely decentralizing the process. So what this really means is that we're unlocking the demand and expanding the market. Our beachhead is urologists, specifically those that are performing a high number of vasectomies as well as fertility clinics. We have three revenue sources. The cell scanner is a one-time purchase for about $5,000; it's complemented with a B2B SaaS platform. We don't have any proprietary consumables, so it's only about software. Clinics will be able to choose which subscription they want based on the number of tests they perform a year. We offer an optional service fee where we would be able to sell standard consumables that go with the device. Key opinion leaders agree; these are our customers and advisors, that there is a huge need for the solution, but also that Illumicell AI can indeed establish a new standard of care in fertility. We have 30 LOIs validating global demand, some of the best in class, Boston IVF, Weill Cornell, Stanford Medicine. We're also currently in clinical trials with Fertas, the Swiss fertility chain. But the truly interesting thing about Illumicell AI lies in the fact that we can, for the first time, gather and aggregate fertility data on an unprecedented scale. We know that sperm is a fantastic biomarker for overall health. It links to some types of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases. It's directly linked to longevity. It has huge implications for pregnancy outcomes and baby health. And right now, this information is simply discarded. Nobody is using it. We believe that we can change it and really unlock the power of predictive AI and look into tools such as prognostic AI, understanding what the pregnancy outcomes could be, diagnostic AI, to understand what the underlying factors of infertility are. Something that people are also super excited about is drug discovery and development and potential many other uses. We're backed by an all-star clinical board. These are directors from Boston IVF, professors at Harvard, Stanford, really top-notch people in male sexual health and fertility. We're getting our engineering AI advice from top institutions in Europe, as well as business advice from ex-VPs at Abbott Pharmaceuticals, LabCorp, and entrepreneurs that have launched their own medical devices multiple times. Our team includes Dr. Michel Bielecki, he's an MD from the University of Zurich, also an MPH from Harvard, former chief medical officer at NATO. Myself, I'm an Imperial College alumna and worked at McKinsey for a number of years. Lew, our third co-founder, is a former rocket scientist, and actually, his invention is at the core of our product. Javier Barranco, Chief AI Officer, has spent six years at the intersection of AI and medicine, doing everything from oncology to neurocognitive diseases at top global institutions, University Hospital Zurich and Lausanne. Ana, she's a PhD from ETH Zurich in optics, and Dr. Austin Lee, a Harvard alum, is himself a trained urologist. So in the last 10 months, we went from it's a cool idea to actually gathering money—$1.2 million, led by Brent Aaron of Canine Partners. We have created a proof of concept prototype that is currently in clinical trials, and we're gearing up for a larger $12 million seed round that will help us finish product development, kick off commercialization, put us through FDA trials, as well as look into potential other applications. If all is in place, we're looking at first revenue in 2027 in the United States.
