Joshua Abram

A robot lab, and a bet that IVF could be for everyone

In a clinic in Mexico City, a machine does something no machine had done before: it handles human eggs and sperm, injects one into the other under a microscope, watches the resulting embryos grow, and freezes them for later, with only light human oversight. The system is called AURA. It is the centerpiece of Conceivable Life Sciences, the company Joshua Abram co-founded in 2022, and it is the clearest statement of the idea that occupied the last chapter of his career: that a Nobel Prize-winning therapy built for the wealthy could be re-engineered into something closer to a public utility.

Abram did not come to fertility from medicine. He came to it the way he came to everything, as a builder of categories that did not exist yet. For more than two decades he and his partner Alan Murray started venture-backed companies across advertising technology, hospitality, and life sciences. By late 2021, those companies carried a combined market value of more than five billion dollars. The pattern was always the same: find a large system that everyone accepts as broken, and refuse to accept it.

With Conceivable, the broken system was the IVF lab itself. Abram was blunt about it. He described elite fertility care as "concierge medicine for the rich," a service whose quality depended on the scarcity of skilled embryologists and the price that scarcity commanded. His goal, as he framed it, was to "multiply by ten the number of families able to access fertility treatment." At his most ambitious, he floated a target that sounded like science fiction: "Sixty-five percent of all IVF births are Conceivable babies."

Orchestration, not invention

What made Abram effective was less a talent for invention than a talent for arrangement. He was quick to say that Conceivable had not created the underlying technologies it depended on. "We didn't invent AI, robotics, or machine vision," he said, "but we've orchestrated them in a way that's never been done before, enabling a seismic shift in how IVF is performed." He borrowed the metaphor of the da Vinci surgical robot to explain the point. "We are the da Vinci robot of IVF," he said, "putting the tools needed by these brilliant single cell surgeons in their hands for the first time, and relieving them of a lot of the pressure."

That framing mattered. It cast embryologists not as workers to be replaced but as "single-cell surgeons" whose precision could be extended by better instruments. Abram was fond of quoting the line often attributed to Picasso: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." His version, applied to AURA, was characteristically dry: "and we stole from the best."

The through-line

To understand why a man who made his money in advertising data ended up automating embryology, it helps to look at what his companies had in common. Integral Ad Science, which he co-founded around 2009, brought measurement and verification to digital advertising, processing enormous volumes of real-time data to tell brands whether their ads were seen by real people. Vista Equity Partners bought it for 850 million dollars in 2018. Dstillery applied machine learning to marketing. Each was, at heart, an attempt to bring order and trust to an invisible, high-volume process.

Fertility was the same problem wearing different clothes. In 2017 Abram and Murray launched TMRW Life Sciences after learning, through a colleague's personal experience, that the management of frozen eggs and embryos had barely changed in decades. Clinics were tracking irreplaceable genetic material with paper labels and manual logs. TMRW built the first automated platform for storing and tracking those specimens, and by 2022 it had raised more than a hundred million dollars and signed clinics across dozens of U.S. sites. Conceivable was the logical next step: if you could automate the storage, why not the lab work itself?

Why it was personal

Abram rarely discussed the fertility mission in purely commercial terms. He tied it to his own life. "Nothing in my life has been more meaningful than being a father," he said, and he treated that sentence less as sentiment than as a business thesis. If parenthood was the most meaningful thing he knew, then widening access to it was a mission worth the difficulty. His companies tended to be named for the future they were trying to reach, TMRW, Conceivable, AURA, a small tell about how he thought.

There was a family precedent for the instinct to take on large, structural problems. Abram grew up in New York City, one of five children of Morris B. Abram, a lawyer and civil-rights advocate who argued a landmark "one person, one vote" case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The son did not go into law, but the appetite for reshaping systems that most people treated as fixed clearly carried over.

NeueHouse and a different kind of building

Not every Abram venture was about data. Around 2013 he co-founded NeueHouse, a members' workspace and cultural venue built for people working in film, fashion, and the arts. It was, in his telling, "the workplace rethought," a set of curated spaces designed to put creative people in the same room. The company sat oddly next to his life-sciences work until you notice the shared premise: both were attempts to design environments where human potential had more room to operate. Whether the raw material was a screenwriter or an embryo, Abram kept returning to the same question of how to give talent better conditions.