Revolutionizing AI fertility care with Ovom Care Co-Founder Dr. Lynae Brayboy
"What we want to do at Ovom is allow people to have the families they want, on the terms they want."
Dr. Lynae Brayboy has one of the most interesting stories of all the great founders in the Merantix Capital portfolio. A US-born physician and scientist and lifelong tech enthusiast, Lynae was formerly the chief medical officer of Clue, the Berlin-based period-tracking app.
Last year, she joined our venture Ovom Care, which combines modern in-person fertility care with advanced AI-based technology, as co-founder and chief medical officer.
The company has been on a roll lately, raising its €4.8 million seed round in the spring to further its mission to make reproductive care more affordable and successful. The company has a clinic in London and other location coming soon to Portugal, already providing tailored, personal, and tech-enabled care to more than 100 patients.
Lynae and I recently sat down at the AI Campus in Berlin for a chat about Ovom, how technology can enhance the patient experience, and the challenges and opportunities of the European healthcare landscape. Our edited conversation is below.
Adrian: Tell me a bit about Ovom Care and how you came to join.
Lynae: Ovom Care is a hybrid IVF clinic, and we leverage AI tools to improve IVF outcomes. We hope that our AI tools improve not only the patient experience, but accessibility and success rates, meaning live birth rates.
At Clue, which is a period tracker, it’s amazing that women can actually keep track of what's happening in their cycles. This is usually the first indication that something has gone awry with your reproductive capacity and success. And so I was at Clue for two and a half years, and, you know, things happened in that time. The economy changed. Capital became very difficult to acquire. It was a very tight time, and unfortunately my team was let go. When one of my team members was looking for a job, I wanted to help her, so I was on LinkedIn more. Otherwise, I'm never on LinkedIn. I came across Felicia, who was a founder-in-residence here at Merantix, and she said that she was starting a stealth fertility tech startup.
She was looking for a co-founder and chief medical officer. So I reached out to her, and the rest is history.
Was it a topic that you had thought about before at Clue? The idea that there might be a way to kind of bring these AI tools into the fertility space.
What was missing from a lot of period tracking apps is, “What do you do now?” You found that you have this pattern. You found that you have this data. But what do you do with it? Usually people bring it to their physician, and their physician goes, “OK, nice, great.” They may be able to act on the data. They may not. The whole point of Ovom is that we want to leverage the data to understand not only about you sitting in front of us, but other women like you. When you think about women's health care, it's lacking data. It's lacking research. It's lacking innovation.
Having the ability to use things like the Oura Ring, like trackers, like LH strips and put them in a cloud and understand what they actually provide. How does that track reproductive outcomes when they actually do get care? No one's done that before, and that's what we're seeking to do at Ovom.
What do you see as the big advantage that AI and machine learning bring to the real-life clinic experience?
When we think about how we manage people in our clinical guidelines, that comes from studies that might have — woo-hoo! — 1,000 people in them.
What if those 1,000 people had 3 million data points, which you can get from cycle tracking. You can get from someone going through an IVF cycle. This is what we're missing in medicine. We're kind of blind to it because we haven't had the tools. What we want to do at Ovom Care is really integrate that, not only into visualizing your data, but how that changes how we manage the patient.
Can you walk us through the patient experience at Ovom and how technology comes into play?
It's first important to say what's the traditional experience. In a traditional IVF clinic, maybe you see an ad in the subway or online or in the newspaper, you hear it on Spotify, and then you give the office a call and you give them all your information. You book your appointment, and then you drive in or you take the subway in, and then you sit there and someone talks to you and you pay them. You decide whether you want to go on with care.
It's a lot of email and a lot of telephone calls. Maybe the nurse calls and you can't pick up, and the nurse is saying, “Make sure you do this and do that.”
We wanted to turn the experience on its head, because that's not very patient-centered. If I have to chase you to get information about my care, that's difficult. Instead, we wanted to allow patients to not have their lives disrupted so that they could actually start their care experience in the comfort of their home on their couch and only come in for what is necessary.
Today at Ovom, people will go on our website or they'll see an ad, they'll click a link, and then they can automatically have a free introductory educational call with me, a clinician, not with a salesperson, Afterwards, we get them onto our app, which is free, no obligation.
They can upload all their records. You have no idea how it works in a traditional clinic where you have to come in with your stack of papers and show people, “This was my lab from last week, and this was my lab from two years ago.” It's a mess.
Why not take that data into consideration and be able to visualize it and say, “Oh wow, your periods actually have been shortening. Oh, wow, your flow has been getting lighter. Oh, wow, this is a new symptom for you that you might be experiencing.”
This is how we now can intervene earlier as opposed to later, when you've already now perhaps gone into menopause prematurely or maybe when you already have a more advanced disease than when you potentially could have come in earlier.
How do you marry being in charge of a high-growth, ambitious company with delivering the level of care that I know that you care so deeply about?
It's not that hard to teach a clinician who's interested how to use tech. People who've been using maybe antiquated ways in their other jobs have now come onto the team, and they're really excited to use tech to reach the patients and to have a better experience.
Being a tech founder, it's what I've always done. I've always been on my phone. I've always been on my computer. But now it's for a higher goal, a higher mission, and also to drive R&D so that we can offer better quality care. Not tomorrow, but maybe five years from now, based on the AI tools and also the innovations that Ovom will bring forth.
How do you view the European healthcare landscape versus the US?
I think when you say European versus American, you're saying huge versus huge, right? Even in different states, healthcare is administered in different ways in the United States. Some things that are legal across the border are legal in another state.
It's the same in the EU, unfortunately. When we talk about reproductive healthcare, it's a minefield for patients because what is allowed in, let's say, the Czech Republic is not allowed in Sweden, which is not allowed in Spain.
What we want to do at Ovom is allow people to have the families they want on the terms they want, sidestepping all of the things that the government, the patriarchy, and society has imposed on the laws of the land. I mean, we're having a battle right now. The right to IVF in the United States is not being protected, despite whatever a politician might say before a debate about protecting IVF.
We've already eroded our basic reproductive rights. I would say in the EU, you can still have access to contraception so that you can have a child when you want. In the EU, some people have access to egg freezing.
That's not universal in the United States. In the EU, there is some access to IVF, although it's very restrictive and very limited. In the U.S., it's only about half the states that have any type of mandate.
There are some differences, but the underlying thing is that the government is not necessarily thinking about women's rights. They're not thinking about reproductive justice. They're not thinking of LGBTQIA communities when these laws are written. It makes it very exclusionary, very discriminatory for the majority of people who need IVF.
How do you see AI and technology can lead to more democratization of fertility care?
One, we can help people have earlier education and access. We should all know some fundamental education about how reproduction works so that if you are now 30 years old seeing this information for free, you don't have to wait until you're 40 to go, “Ohh wow, I didn't know. No one told me.” And AI can help with that because I can't say it in every language. I can't be everywhere. I can't be at every conference.
The other thing is that we can look at pricing models that help people in their locale. Right now we have a clinic that's already open and functional in London, and that has one price point in London. But in Portugal, where we're opening soon, we have a very different price point. People can contrast and compare online without leaving, without having to take off work, you know, really with what they want to do. And so that's accessibility, which is a big, big issue.
Having different clinics in different places, we can offer things that are maybe not offered in one clinic. And having that information readily available is also helpful.
The place I want to get to the future is that AI tools can really revolutionize the way that we look at human gametes. We're already using the tools that are cutting edge that are on the market today, but our R&D is really interested in looking at even a deeper layer. AI is the only way to do that. How do you process a million data points from one cell and have that reflect what's happening in the clinical outcomes?
It gives transparency also to the patient so that, say, you go through a cycle and you don't have the outcome that you want. You're not able to get pregnant. But why? The “why” is always difficult for patients, because a lot of IVF clinics just say, “Oh, just cycle again and again.”
People don't have unlimited resources and unlimited time. Now if you know that your eggs are poor quality, maybe you decide you want to do egg donation. This is what you have money left over to do. Or maybe you decide I want to adopt. Having that empowerment allows you to have more control over something that's been wrested from you, because people do feel like they're out of control when now they can't have a child when they want to have a child.
At the risk of being self-promotional, how has working with Merantix helped you and your company, beyond the financial investment.
I would never have met Felicia, my co-founder. Felicia would have probably never met Cristina, our third co-founder, had it not been for Merantix.
We didn't run in the same circles, right? Felicia was here had the ability to be in Berlin because of the Founder-in-Residence program. We had the ability to talk to see if it would work out as a founder-co-founder relationship. Those early days are really, really important. Now I've experienced what it's like to incubate here and to be sort of like a baby company, where you get help and where you get resources.
We had an event in the Merantix AI Campus town hall, which really kicked off our momentum in July of 2023, and now we're planning another event.
We've grown so much. I just talked to a contact I had when I was at Clue, and they were like, “So what are you doing now?” I told them, and they said, “You already have 22 employees?” We wouldn't have had that momentum if we hadn't started at Merantix.
Thanks very much for the chat!
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