Women's health company Evvy announced on Tuesday that it has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Catalio Capital Management.
Founded in 2021 by Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek, and Pita Navarro, Evvy is best known for operating what it describes as the world's only at-home CLIA-certified and CLEP-certified metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) test that analyzes vaginal microbes from a single swab.
Users mail their swab samples to Evvy's lab, where they are analyzed using the company's proprietary mNGS sequencing. Results are then sent to clinicians registered on the platform for review and posted online in the patient's health portal.
"When a patient receives their results, they are presented alongside a diagnosis, clinical interpretation, and a clear path of next steps, including personalized prescription care when relevant," CEO and co-founder Priyanka Jain told TechCrunch.
Since its launch, Evvy says it now serves more than 100,000 patients across the United States and works with 3,000 practitioners. "We've generated 15 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts, identified novel BV subtypes, and discovered hundreds of previously uncatalogued vaginal microbiome genomes," Jain said.
She added that clinicians on Evvy can now leverage the collected data to offer personalized treatment to patients.
However, treating patients is only one part of the company's vision. Its larger 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 in precision medicine today: the lack of high-quality, representative data on female bodies. "You can't build precision medicine for women on datasets that never adequately measured female biology in the first place," Jain said, citing how leading AI models often struggle to answer questions about women's health.
"That's why I believe AI for women's health needs to be paired with new biological data at scale. 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 launched 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 require 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." With that in mind, the startup is also now entering the fertility space, ...