Dawn of the Silicon Valley Superbaby

When venture capitalist Jack Abraham first began dating his wife, Gabriella Massamillo, he insisted on one condition: that when they were ready to have children, she’d be willing to conceive using in vitro fertilization. Abraham had lost both his mother and his aunt at a young age to ovarian cancer, linked to a rare mutation in their BRCA-1 genes. As a carrier of the mutation, he didn’t want to leave their children’s fate to chance. He wanted to genetically test their embryos before selecting which ones to implant via IVF.

“When we were starting on this journey, I thought, ‘Who better to chat with than Noor?’” Abraham recalled. That would be Noor Siddiqui, founder of Orchid, a San Francisco–based genetic testing startup that counts Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Figma’s Dylan Field and 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki as investors.

For $2,500 an embryo, Orchid customers can screen for monogenic disorders (which are caused by a single gene) as well as more-complex polygenic factors, such as predispositions to diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and a host of other health issues. Customers receive a whole-genome embryo report...