At This IVF Clinic, You Can Design Your "Best Baby" By Selecting Their Genes

There's a new startup causing waves right now. No, it's not about how they can deliver something in 10 minutes. It's about what they will deliver after nine months: a baby. But not just any baby. One shaped by your preferences, with specific physical traits, potential future diseases, height, IQ, and more. Yes, I wish we were joking.

Called Nucleus Genomics, it is a New York-based startup making significant waves in the fertility industry. Upon visiting their website, we were greeted with a line that feels more like an advertisement for a luxury product than a human life.

"Have your best baby. The new way to bring your baby home," the site says.

  Nucleus Genomics's site. Photo: Nucleus Genomics

Nucleus Genomics, founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Kian Sadeghi, has built its brand around whole: "genome sequencing and preventive health".

Until now, it sold itself as the company that can scan all six billion letters of your DNA to help predict everything from cancer risk to metabolic disorders. But its latest push into the fertility space is clearly designed to offer something far more provocative: the ability to "design" your baby, or at the very least, influence how they might look, behave, and live.

The Embryo Quiz

Through its website, Nucleus now has an embryo-testing experience that resembles those BuzzFeed-style personality quizzes we all secretly enjoy. Only here, the stakes are slightly higher.

The embryo form asks you what kind of baby you want. And yes, it's exactly as specific as it sounds.

• Eye colour? Tick a box.
• Height? Select a range.
• General IQ? Pick the number
• Risk of diseases such as breast cancer or diabetes? Select your level of concern.

Compare your embryos ft Nucleus Genomics. Photo: Nucleus Genomics

There are more than 2,000 combinations to choose from. It's marketed as data-driven, clinical, and scientifically advanced, yet the user experience feels almost gamified. You enter preferences. The system crunches the genetics. And almost instantly, you're given predictions about which embryo might match your "ideal" profile most closely.

For a generation raised on shopping algorithms and customised skincare, it's disturbingly intuitive.

What The Company Says It Is Actually Doing

Nucleus Genomics maintains that it isn't running a dystopian baby factory. Its pitch rests on sequencing accuracy, predictive models, and long-term health.

It uses clinical-grade whole-genome sequencing, and estimates risks for hundreds of diseases and traits, builds polygenic risk models, and integrates lifestyle data for more precise reports (not so precise though).

"Genetics can be a helpful tool for choosing an embryo, but it's not a guarantee. If you have any questions or concerns after reading this report, we recommend speaking with your fertility healthcare provider or your IVF+ genetic counselor," the company writes in their fine print.

Most of this is done through an at-home kit priced in the low-hundreds of dollars, with results accessed through a web dashboard. The company calls itself "software-first", investing heavily in analytics and the interface that turns raw DNA into something people can understand without feeling like they're reading a textbook.

Founder Kian Sadeghi often repeats his mission: making preventive genomics accessible. The 25-year-old entrepreneur, the son of a refugee from the Iranian regime, had a cousin who died in her sleep because of a genetic disorder, which motivated him to start this company.

According to him, couples are now choosing to do IVF with Nucleus and their campaign has already crossed over 2.5 million impressions across social media channels with site visits exponentiating.

The Bigger Questions

Still, when you create an embryo-testing product that essentially invites parents to pick desirable traits, you enter an ethical minefield. Even if the company insists the goal is healthier babies, the framing leans heavily toward optimisation, choice, and control.

The platform's language doesn't help. Have your best baby blurs into have a better baby faster than most people are comfortable admitting.

And that's the exact concern ethicists have been shouting about for years: that the desire to minimise disease will quickly tip into the desire to engineer superiority (Remember Sydney Sweeney's great genes controversy?). Whether intended or not, companies like Nucleus normalise the idea that some babies can be "better" than others because their genomes have been curated.

The Race To Future

Nucleus Genomics sits at an interesting intersection: part consumer tech, part healthcare, part futuristic science fiction. It has raised around 32 million USD, backed by big-name investors like Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six and Founders Fund. It makes privacy a major selling point, promising not to sell user data without consent.

But this new embryo-selection feature throws the biggest ethical spotlight the company has faced so far.

At the core of the criticism lies one fundamental question: Where do we draw the line between preventing disease and designing superiority?

Choosing an embryo with lower genetic risk for breast cancer feels understandable. Choosing one with a specific eye colour or higher predicted IQ feels like the beginning of something much more complicated.

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