Verility, Inc., an ag bioscience company based out of Hancock County, has received $3.5 million investment through Series A funding to further develop its livestock breeding technology.
The company, which started in 2018 and is located north of Greenfield in Maxwell, Indiana, develops and markets technologies that assess livestock semen and ovulation samples.
Verility received $100,000 as one of two winners of the Purdue Ag-Celerator, an agriculture innovation fund, in January 2022.
Verility has created a global platform called Fertile-EyezTM that enables rapid, sensitive, accurate, and cost-effective animal-side semen quality check and ovulation prediction through Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based image analysis frameworks and optical sensors.
The company has licensed the intellectual property from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a nonprofit teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, where it was originally created and validated in humans.
The company’s co-founder and CEO Liane Hart said improving sperm analysis and improving ovulation detection for animal breeding are two of the most important ways to meet the critical need for more edible meat protein. She said conception rate is known to be highly correlated with producer profitability and food sustainability.
“The Series A funding will allow us to develop our product for swine producers and breeders in a major segment of production,” said Hart. “The investment will allow us to reach the point of preparing for commercialization, which we anticipate in late 2023. It’s extremely exciting to have the ability to bring automated mobile breeding technologies into a segment of the animal health industry that normally does not see much innovation.”
Hart has a B.S. in Animal Science and a M.S. in Breeding and Genetics, both from Purdue University.
Riley Gibb, director of business development at Purdue Foundry, said the company is a strong example of startups that bring Purdue-supported innovations to the market.
“Liane Hart is one of many high-quality entrepreneurs bringing Purdue-supported startups to market,” he said. “Verility and other companies are already making an impact in plant sciences and animal sciences.”
Futurology Life selected Verility as one of its top agriculture technology companies in Indiana earlier in 2022. Hart recently participated in Purdue Foundry’s Women in Entrepreneurship Panel and AgriNovus Indiana’s Quadrant event for ag bioscience entrepreneurs.
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Source: Purdue University
