AI Designer Babies? Thiel-Backed Startup Claims 14-Point IQ Boost

A startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund says its latest model can sort IVF embryos by intelligence, with 14 IQ points between the top and bottom of a batch of ten.

"AI is rapidly getting smarter. Now, humanity can too," Nucleus Genomics founder Kian Sadeghi wrote on Sept. 18, announcing Vitruvian, the company's newest set of "genetic optimization models." 

"Vitruvian's intelligence model can optimize embryo DNA for 14 IQ points - nearly a standard deviation," he said, adding that the models were trained on more than a million people and validated on more than 40,000 siblings.

Vitruvian doesn't edit DNA. It scores the embryos an IVF cycle has already produced, so parents can choose which one to implant. Besides intelligence, Nucleus has pitched comparisons of each embryo's height, eye and hair color, and risk of breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and autism.

According to the company's whitepaper, the expected gap between the highest- and lowest-scoring embryo in a batch of ten is 14.3 IQ points; with five embryos, it's 10.8. Choosing the top embryo instead of an average one is worth half that spread, the whitepaper says: about 7 points with ten embryos, and about 5 with five.

The five-embryo figure is about double what researchers estimated in 2019. A study in Cell that year put the average gain from screening at about 2.5 IQ points for a typical IVF cycle of about five viable embryos, and about 3 points with ten. Nucleus says its score now captures roughly 62% of the common genetic variance in cognitive ability.

The intelligence score was trained on association data from about 500,000 people, according to the whitepaper, and tested on about 40,000 siblings of European ancestry in the UK Biobank. The "IQ" it predicts is the Biobank's verbal-numerical reasoning test. Between siblings, the score accounts for about 19% of the variance in latent cognitive ability, after an adjustment for the test's reliability.

Nucleus, founded by Sadeghi after he dropped out of college, raised a $14 million Series A in January 2025, bringing its total to about $32 million from backers including Founders Fund, Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six and Balaji Srinivasan, TechCrunch reported. It began with adult genetic tests, including one for IQ, and moved into scoring IVF embryos last year.

One week before the Vitruvian launch, the National Advertising Division of BBB National Programs, the ad industry's watchdog, recommended in a decision that Nucleus stop implying its IVF+ service can accurately determine which embryo will be the smartest. The company's evidence, NAD said, "failed to establish the accuracy of identifying the highest-IQ embryo within a multi-embryo group." Nucleus said it would appeal, saying NAD's "conclusions cannot be reconciled." We could find no ruling on the appeal.

The leading US professional body for fertility doctors is no fan either. Last December, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's ethics and practice committees concluded that polygenic embryo screening "is a nascent and unproven technology that should not be used clinically at this time."

Nucleus's "Have Your Best Baby" campaign went up in New York's subway last fall with banners declaring "IQ is 50% genetic" and "Height is 80% genetic," and the MTA turned down two more lines, "Have a girl" and "Have a boy," according to MIT Technology Review. Sadeghi said the campaign was "normalizing" genetic optimization.