Evvy raises $40M as it seeks to further women’s health research with vaginal microbiome data

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. 

“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.

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. “You can’t build precision medicine for women on data sets 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 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. “Women shouldn’t have to accept unexplained infertility, unexplained recurrence or unexplained symptoms as answers when what they often mean is that medicine hasn’t caught up to the data yet.”

But things are improving. 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. “An at-home, non-invasive sample that can provide women with more regular, data-rich insights across infections, inflammation, fertility, PCOC, endometriosis, premenopause, HPV progression, and more,” she said.

“I don’t think we can wait for traditional research methods to catch up,” she said. “I believe women, as patients, can be part of pushing the industry forward.”