The engineer who decided the hardest problem worth solving was how an embryo gets made

Ask most founders about the part of a problem they love, and they will point you to the exciting end - the launch, the demo, the thing that photographs well. Alan Murray tends to point the other way. He looks for the step someone still does by hand, over and over, at a scale too small to see, and he asks why the result should depend on whose hand it is. That instinct has carried him through three unrelated industries. It has now landed him inside the fertility lab.

Murray is an engineer by training, out of the University of Kentucky, and a serial entrepreneur by temperament. Across roughly three decades he helped build companies in digital advertising, hospitality and life sciences - a run that reads like a random walk until you notice the through-line. Integral Ad Science, which became a public company, brought measurement to messy online media. Dstillery did data science for advertising. NeueHouse built private work-and-social spaces for creators. Each looks different on the surface. Each took something manual, inconsistent and hard to trust, and tried to make it repeatable.

The pivotFirst he built the freezer

The life-sciences chapter started with TMRW Life Sciences, which Murray co-founded to build the first automated platform for managing frozen eggs and embryos. Before TMRW, storage in an IVF lab could still come down to handwritten labels and manual logbooks - a fragile system guarding some of the most precious material a family will ever entrust to anyone. Automating that was a real problem, and TMRW solved a real part of it.

But building the freezer taught Murray where the freezer sat in the chain. Storage happens after the embryo already exists. And the making of the embryo - the fertilization, the micro-injection, the culturing, the freezing and thawing - was still almost entirely manual. That is the part he decided to go after next.

The company built to chase that idea is Conceivable Life Sciences, where Murray is co-founder and co-CEO alongside longtime partner Joshua Abram and Dr. Alejandro Chavez-Badiola. His title inside the company is chief architect of AURA, the system Conceivable calls the world's first automation-assisted IVF laboratory.

The argumentWhoever is holding the pipette that day

Murray's case for AURA rests on a single uncomfortable observation about how IVF actually works. The lab work behind every cycle depends on a small number of highly trained embryologists doing manual, repetitive, sub-micron precision tasks by hand. They are extraordinary at it. But they are human, and the outcome, in his framing, varies by who is holding the pipette that day.

His answer is not to remove the embryologist. It is to remove the variance from the repetitive tasks and leave the judgment where it belongs. AURA integrates robotics, advanced optics and machine learning across the workflow, running more than 200 discrete steps as one continuous system rather than a chain of separate machines. Computer-vision models adapted from the object-detection world - names like YOLO and RT-DETR - do work as delicate as identifying a single sperm or locating an egg. A cooling technology the company calls C:VIT drops embryo temperature up to fifty times faster than conventional methods.

The engineering logic is the same one Murray has used his whole career, now pointed at biology. As he puts it, if you could bring the same rigor to embryo creation that manufacturing and robotics have brought to other precision industries, you could make IVF more consistent. Consistency is the actual product here - the promise that the lab produces the same quality outcome regardless of which clinic, which day, or which patient population it is serving. That is the guarantee manual IVF has never quite been able to make.

The mathThe wrong number, and the right one

There is a second argument underneath the first, and it is about money. IVF is expensive, and in Murray's reading affordability is not one barrier among many - it looks like the primary one. In the United States, assisted reproduction accounts for a small slice of all births; in countries where cost is lower, the share runs several times higher. The gap, he argues, is largely economic.

But he is careful about which cost you measure. The industry likes to quote cost per cycle. Murray thinks that number quietly misleads, because a cheaper cycle that does not result in a baby was not actually cheaper. The metric he tracks instead is cost per live birth - the only figure that lines up affordability with the thing families are paying for.

The proofFrom a working lab to a bigger one

None of this would matter if it only lived in slides. Conceivable has a working deployment - a lab in Mexico City where the system runs - and prototype studies that, by the company's account, have resulted in 18 healthy babies born. In September 2025 the company closed a $50 million Series A led by Advance Venture Partners, with earlier backers participating. The money is pointed at a specific target: taking the system from a lab that works to clinics in the United States, with a first deployment planned for 2027 alongside a fertility network.

What makes Murray a slightly unusual figure in a field crowded with hardware demos is how little he sells the robots. He describes AURA as automation-assisted, not automated. He keeps returning the microphone to the embryologist. In an industry that loves to promise that the machine will do everything, his pitch is narrower and, arguably, more honest: the machine does the repetition, the people do the deciding, and the reward is a result you can trust to be the same tomorrow as it was today.

It is a quiet way to describe a loud ambition. Conceivable's stated aim is to raise the number of families that assisted reproduction can reach - not by inventing a new biology, but by engineering the consistency and the cost out of the old one. Murray has spent his career finding the step everyone does by hand and building the system that does it the same way every time. This time the step happens to be the beginning of a life.