Women’s health company Evvy on Tuesday said it has raised a $40 million Series B led by Catalio Capital Management. Launched in 2021 by Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek, and Pita Navarro, the company is best known for operating what it touts as the world’s only at-home CLIA-certified and CLEP-certified mNGS test to analyze vaginal microbes with one swab. The user mails their swab samples to Evvy’s lab, which then analyzes the results using its own mNGS sequencing, sends them to clinicians registered on its platform for review, and posts the results online in the patient’s health portal.
Since its launch, Evvy says it now serves more than 100,000 patients across the United States, and works with 3,000 practitioners. She added that clinicians on Evvy can now leverage the collected data to offer personalized treatment to patients. But treating patients is only one part of the company’s vision.
Its bigger goal is to build a dataset that connects microbiome biology, symptoms, interventions, and health outcomes, “creating a continuous feedback loop that unlocks improvements to care and the discovery of entirely new biomarkers,” Jain said. There is a fundamental flaw right now with precision medicine: the lack of high-quality, representative data on female bodies. AI can help us identify patterns across molecular signals, hormones, symptoms, treatments, fertility outcomes, and other biomarkers that traditional medicine has struggled to connect.” In May, the company started offering its own AI assistant called EvvyAI, which it bills as an advisor for vaginal health.
It translates the microbiome data that Evvy has collected into real-time guidance for users, and directs patients to clinicians for questions that need expert opinions. When Evvy launched, Jain said it was with the belief that she and the team could leverage certain indicators in the vaginal biome to “predict and improve outcomes across the female lifespan,” she said. With that in mind, the startup is also now entering the fertility space, its first major foray beyond vaginal health.
Right now, the company is still compiling data and science, specifically linking vaginal microbiomes to infertility, gynecological cancer, preterm birth, IVF success rates, and recurrent pregnancy loss. The company last year launched a prospective study leveraging its vaginal microbiome tests in IVF clinics. Hopefully, Jain said, collecting more data in women’s health can help the industry move away from the unexplained.
Besides Evvy, others in the vaginal health space include JunoBio, TinyHealth, and Daye. In the long term, Jain hopes that Evvy can create a new-age Pap smear.
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