Technology
The Startup Making Human Embryos With AI-Assisted Robots
Conceivable’s automated lab has helped bring 19 babies to life. Is it better at IVF than humans are?
Robotic arms equipped with micromanipulation tools carry out a fertilization procedure at Hope IVF in Mexico City.
Photographer: Fred Ramos for Bloomberg Businessweek
In the posh Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, in a building tucked behind a Japanese restaurant, a sleek medical office upstairs had something new on display behind glass: a 17-foot-long, 4,500-pound robotic assembly line called the AURA. It’s an artificial-intelligence-powered fertility lab, the only mechanical system in the world that can achieve all the steps in making a human embryo—at least, the steps that can be done outside a woman’s body.