AenF Partners arranges financing for In Ovo

An investment group consisting of Evonik, VisVires New Protein (Singapore) and Leiden University provides financing to In Ovo of Leiden.

In Ovo has developed a technique to quickly and reliably determine whether a hen or a rooster will emerge from a hatching egg in the hatchery. The technique can be well integrated in the daily routine of a hatchery where about 100.000 hatching eggs are processed per day. The technique is relevant for hatcheries for laying hens. Cocks of laying grasses are also hatched on a large scale on an annual basis. These have hardly any economic value and are in practice killed as day-old chicks.

Ovo was founded in 2013 by 2 biotechnologists from Leiden. They developed a technique to use biomarkers to determine the sex of the embryo in the hatching egg. The aim is to develop a prototype after the capital injection in cooperation with German and Dutch partners in order to be able to apply the technique on a large scale. It now takes 1 second to be able to determine the sex in the hatching egg. The goal is to reduce that time to a few microseconds. Existing proven techniques for grading and processing eggs on a large scale will be used. The technique is expected to be commercially available in 2020.

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