San Jose, California – The cost of healthcare has skyrocketed. One service that has seen exponential price hikes is IVF. There is good news though. OMA Fertility, in conjunction with its trailblazing Chief Commercial Officer, Dr. Sahil Gupta, is changing the face of fertility services. Using AI and robotics, Dr. Gupta seeks to make procedures more affordable, accessible, and accurate. Oma Fertility utilizes Oma Sperm InSight to ensure through AI technology that you have the greatest chance of achieving pregnancy.
Oma Fertility was founded in 2020 by a team of engineers, AI experts, and fertility specialists who believe that combining AI and robotics in the lab and human-centered care in the clinic will make parenthood possible for more people The original founders: CEO Gurjeet Singh, Ph.D. in Computational Math; CCO Dr. Sahil Gupta, fertility specialist; and CTO Kiran Joshi, Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, all have a deep passion for making parenthood possible for their clients.
How Does AI-Driven Fertility Work?
In conventional sperm selection, an embryologist typically spends less than one minute examining 20 sperm cells and selecting one cell per egg. The process is highly manual, time-constrained, and subjective, with high rates of disagreement between embryologists about what a healthy sperm cell looks like. Their AI technology, Oma Sperm InSight, was created by a team of engineers, AI experts, and fertility specialists who spent many years developing the system to evaluate the morphology (shape) and motility (pattern of movement) of each sperm cell in real-time.
To train the AI, they created a large dataset of individual sperm cells that were analyzed by a panel of embryologists. The AI within Oma Sperm InSight was trained to predict the consensus opinion of the panel. Oma Sperm InSight helps reduce the variability in sperm selection resulting from human subjectivity. The AI tracks the sperm anywhere in the sample and tags the most (and least) promising sperm, so embryologists don’t have to rely on hand-eye coordination and fast reflexes.
Dr. Sahil Gupta’s Track Record Making IVF Accessible
“Typically, IVF and fertility treatments in around the world are priced at an outrageous cost of $5000-8000 per cycle. In the US, that cost is a generally whopping $20,000 and it takes multiple cycles on average to achieve a pregnancy. This is essentially a paywall that keeps out the public and makes fertility impossible for those that struggle and can’t afford it.” Dr. Gupta set out to fix this problem and launched Aveya in India in 2015, with the hope of bringing affordable reproductive medicine to the common people. It was a wildly successful venture and helped thousands of individuals conceive successfully.
Given that he had proof of concept in running Aveya and was successfully in administering 6,000 cycles of IVF yearly throughout his eight clinics throughout India and in Nepal, Dr. Gupta started Oma Robotics to institute his pioneering business model in the United States, and make it possible to make IVF and fertility treatments more affordable and even more efficient using AI and robotics.
Even with advances in recent decades, the success rate for IVF is still around only 30% today. The typical IVF patient goes through three cycles to get pregnant before giving up. Even when successful, IVF is still an enormously draining process, physically and emotionally—especially for women. Reducing these stressors and improving the success rate is critical. Oma Fertility set out to improve the experience and knew they could do that through a novel AI tool to assist in IVF.nd robotics.
Industry Understanding with a Purpose
In the US, one of the most privatized health industries in the world, which makes it one of the most expensive in the world, Oma is filling the much-needed niche for more affordable fertility services. Dr. Sahil Gupta has made his mark on the industry through both his medical expertise and his ground breaking business model. “As a physician entrepreneur, success to me means delivering top–quality patient experience and care while generating shareholder value,” he says. “Success also means that we are building a company that has a positive impact and brings joy to the lives of thousands of people. ‘The Why’ is a very important part of success.”
