Timing has followed Liane Hart around for most of her working life. At Purdue, she studied the age at which Quarter Horses reach peak racing performance. At Cedar Brick Farm, timing was no academic abstraction: breeding, breaking and training racehorses makes the calendar a colleague. At Elanco, where she moved from clinical research into new-product planning and global marketing, timing meant knowing when an idea was ready to become a product. Now it is the entire proposition.
Hart is the co-founder and CEO of Verility, a small Indiana company developing Fertile-Eyez, a handheld system designed to help livestock producers make more precise breeding decisions. It pairs optical sensing and image analysis with a mobile device. The intended result is straightforward enough to say over a fence: assess a sample near the animal, receive an answer, and act while the answer is useful.
Agricultural technology often arrives dressed for a conference stage. Hart's version has to survive the barn. It has to contend with limited time, uneven connectivity, fewer available workers and the unromantic fact that biological signals are not always considerate enough to appear on schedule. A model may be clever. The producer still needs it to be clear.
The useful leap
The company began with a piece of technology that was not built for a sow barn. Hadi Shafiee and his research team in Boston had developed a compact, smartphone-based fertility analysis approach. When Hart saw it, the recognition was immediate. She was asked whether it might have a use in animal agriculture. Her response, recalled in a 2022 interview, came with the enthusiasm of someone who had already spent years living beside the problem.
“Being a fellow breeder and geneticist, my eyes lit up when I saw the technology. My jaw dropped at just how easy it was to use.”Liane Hart
This is the entrepreneurial move at the center of Hart's story. She did not invent a market around a fashionable capability. She recognized a practical use because she spoke both languages: the language of breeding science and the language of product adoption. Verility brought Hart together with Shafiee, finance and strategy executive Brian Kopp, and product leader Scott Baxter. The four founders formed a company around translation.
The translation is more demanding than moving an instrument from one species to another. Farms are operating businesses, not demonstration rooms. A useful device must be affordable, repeatable and understandable. It must reduce uncertainty without creating a new ritual of maintenance and interpretation. Hart's favored description captures the desired experience: a digital microscope and skilled laboratory technician in the palm of a hand.
Keep the analysis close to the breeding workflow.
A mobile attachment turns a sample into readable visual data.
Software evaluates patterns that otherwise require trained interpretation.
Return an answer while the breeding decision still matters.
A career that rhymes
Hart's route to the CEO seat began long before Verility was incorporated in 2018. She earned a bachelor's degree in Animal Sciences from Purdue in 1997. She competed in Western Pleasure on the university's equestrian team and interned at Biggs Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, where the work centered on Thoroughbred and sport-horse breeding. Two years later, she completed a master's degree in animal breeding and genetics. Her research examined age at peak performance in Quarter Horse racing, and Purdue later noted that she was its first graduate student to study equine racing.
She started as an Extension Educator, a job built around making specialist knowledge useful beyond campus. Then came Elanco Animal Health, first in clinical research and later in new-product planning. Her roles expanded into global product launches, portfolio strategy, regulatory work, business development and marketing across several animal markets. The résumé reads broad because the eventual founder's job is broad.
All the while, horses remained part of the education. Hart owned and managed Cedar Brick Farm in Greenfield, Indiana, and worked as a Thoroughbred assistant trainer and breeder. Her horses raced in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. This matters because breeding is especially resistant to management clichés. The variables are alive, the feedback loops are long, and confidence can be expensive. Experience teaches respect for the difference between an attractive prediction and a dependable decision.
Purdue recognized Hart with its Animal Sciences Distinguished Alumni Early Career Award in 2012. A decade later, the university became part of the Verility story too. The startup received $100,000 from the Purdue Ag-Celerator in early 2022. That summer it closed a $3.5 million Series A round led by Mountain Group Partners, with participation tied to the Purdue Foundry. The money was meant to move the system through development toward commercialization in swine.
Evidence before ornament
The company's progress is easiest to understand through its tests. In 2022, Hart joined researchers in publishing a peer-reviewed validation of a smartphone-based device for measuring concentration, motility and morphology in swine semen. The technical point was not merely that a phone could participate in the measurement. It was that a portable approach might replace equipment and interpretation that are difficult to bring on-farm.
A later evaluation across 400 sows on two farms compared protocols guided by Fertile-Eyez with traditional breeding routines. Verility reported comparable pregnancy and embryo results while using fewer semen doses, heat checks and boar-exposure days. Those are the metrics that make an algorithm legible to a producer. The farm does not purchase artificial intelligence as an abstraction. It considers labor, inputs, consistency and the probability of a successful breeding.
Hart talks about the product in similarly concrete terms. Traditional ovulation checks can be inaccessible, imprecise or invasive. The Verility proposition is to detect the useful signal with less subjectivity and return it in time to alter the protocol. Precision, in this context, is not a decorative decimal point. It is the chance to use fewer resources without surrendering an outcome.
“The traditional way to determine which animals to inseminate and when has been done the same way for decades.”Liane Hart
That sentence reveals Hart's operator instinct. She is interested in the inherited routine - the thing everyone performs because everyone already performs it. A startup rarely needs to prove that an old workflow is foolish. It needs to show, patiently, that a new one can be trusted. Verility has described its commercial approach as a phased pioneer launch, built around customer use and proof at each step.
Small company, long horizon
By 2025, Verility still listed four employees. Smallness is not a personality trait, but it determines behavior. There is little room for experiments with no owner, partnerships with no next action, or features that photograph well and work poorly. Hart's career range becomes operational leverage: she can move from regulatory detail to a farm conversation, then explain the market to an investor without pretending these are unrelated disciplines.
Public recognition has followed the evidence. Indianapolis Business Journal named Verility a startup to watch in 2025. The company won the Judges' Choice vote at that year's Production Animal Innovation Showcase. In 2026, it was a finalist for the TechPoint Mira AgriNovus Indiana Agbioscience Innovation Award and appeared among the startups at the Animal AgTech Innovation Summit in Fort Worth. Verility has also continued raising capital, with a 2026 securities filing covering a convertible-note offering.
The larger ambition extends beyond one protocol and one species. Hart has discussed expanding fertility tools across animal markets and geographies. Yet the most convincing part of the vision remains the smallest scene: one worker, one animal, one device and an answer arriving before the moment passes. Grand agricultural systems are changed through thousands of local decisions. The phone earns its place one breeding at a time.
There is a pleasing circularity here. A student studies when a racehorse peaks. A marketer learns how research becomes a product. A breeder learns how nature mocks a tidy spreadsheet. A founder encounters an ingenious tool and asks where it belongs. Decades later, all four people turn out to be Hart. The career does not form a straight line. It forms a useful loop.
Her story offers a quiet lesson about founder-market fit. It is not simply knowing an industry or loving a technology. It is carrying enough context to recognize the right tool, enough humility to test it in the real setting, and enough range to lead it across the awkward distance between demonstration and habit. In Hart's case, that distance runs from a Boston laboratory to an Indiana breeding barn. She has spent much of her life learning the road.