Business briefs: Ag tech startup lands $3.5M investment

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Liane Hart, co-founder and CEO of Verility Inc.

Daily Reporter file photo

HANCOCK COUNTY — Verility Inc., led by co-founder and CEO Liane Hart, has closed Series A funding worth $3.5 million. The round was led by Mountain Group Partners of Nashville, Tennessee, and includes a previous investment from Purdue Foundry.

Verility has created a global platform called Fertile-Eyez, which provides fertility analysis products that enable livestock producers and breeders to accelerate reproductive performance. It provides analysis to predict ovulation phase and sperm quality at the point of care. The company has licensed the intellectual property from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a nonprofit teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, where it was originally created and validated in humans.

“The Series A funding will allow us to develop our product for swine producers and breeders in a major segment of production,” Hart said in a news release. “The investment will allow us to reach the point of preparing for commercialization, which we anticipate in late 2023. It’s extremely exciting to have the ability to bring automated mobile breeding technologies into a segment of the animal health industry that normally does not see much innovation.”

Unemployment rises slightly

HANCOCK COUNTY — The county’s preliminary unemployment rate for June was 2.7%, up from May’s 2.1% but down from June 2021’s 3.2%, according to information from the Indiana Department of Workforce Development.

Indiana’s preliminary jobless rate for June was 3.2%, up from May’s 2.5% but down from June 2021’s 4.4%. Howard County had the highest preliminary rate in the state for last month, at 6.5%, while Boone, LaGrange, Ohio and Steuben counties had the lowest, at 2.2%.

The U.S. preliminary unemployment rate for June was 3.8%, up from 3.4% in May and down from 6.1% in June 2021.