French medtech mojo diagnostics raises €1.7 million to make fertility treatments more affordable and effective

mojo diagnostics, the French medtech working to improve fertility care, has raised a €1.7 million round led by Nordic seed fund Inventure, with participation from Doberman, Privilege Ventures, and a number of angel investors. Fertility therapies on the market are out of reach for many people. Existing Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) are trial and error processes, requiring several rounds of attempted fertilization. The inaccuracy amounts to an extremely high price tag, between €40,000-100,000, for a treatment that has only a 25 percent success rate. mojo is applying computer vision and robotic automation technology to make ART more accurate and effective, and therefore more affordable and accessible to aspiring parents. The startup has built mojo pro, an AI-assisted semen assessment and selection platform. Essentially mojo has made the process much smarter and more automated, by screening sperm quality before attempted insemination to select the most viable. “We’re excited to work with mojo and share their vision on the future of fertility. For too long, men have been excluded from the IVF process where evidently the semen analysis and being able to assess its quality is crucial to increase the success rates of conceiving healthy babies. We believe that Mohamed and his team have the best technology in the space and can take this to the market successfully, realizing their vision of democratizing fertility care.” Tatiana, investment manager at Inventure Founded in Lyon by CEO Mohamed Taha, Fanny Chesa, Tobias Boecker, and Daniel Thomas, the company aims to drive down the cost of ART and increase success rates to 75% by 2030, but that’s not all. mojo sees a lot more potential for itself in the IVF market, which is currently at $20 billion, so that the company may move beyond fertilization success and into the murky area of DNA selection. It believes that “inexpensive genome sequencing and shifting cultural behaviors” will open up new applications for their technology, noting that, “in the future, all aspiring parents may decide to use ART to eliminate the risk of inherited disease.”