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

Women’s wellness institution Evvy connected Tuesday said it has raised a $40 cardinal Series B led by Catalio Capital Management.

Launched successful 2021 by Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek, and Pita Navarro, the institution is champion known for operating what it touts arsenic the world’s lone at-home CLIA-certified and CLEP-certified mNGS trial to analyse vaginal microbes with 1 swab.

The idiosyncratic mails their swab samples to Evvy’s lab, which past analyzes the results utilizing its ain mNGS sequencing, sends them to clinicians registered connected its level for review, and posts the results online successful the patient’s wellness portal. 

“When a diligent receives their results, they are presented alongside a diagnosis, objective interpretation, and a wide way of adjacent steps, including personalized medicine attraction erstwhile relevant,” CEO and co-founder Priyanka Jain told TechCrunch.

Since its launch, Evvy says it present serves much than 100,000 patients crossed the United States, and works with 3,000 practitioners. “We’ve generated 15-peer reviewed publications and abstracts, identified caller BV subtypes, and discovered hundreds of antecedently uncatalogued vaginal microbiome genomes,” Jain said.

She added that clinicians connected Evvy tin present leverage the collected information to connection personalized attraction to patients.

But treating patients is lone 1 portion of the company’s vision. Its bigger extremity is to physique a dataset that connects microbiome biology, symptoms, interventions, and wellness outcomes, “creating a continuous feedback loop that unlocks improvements to attraction and the find of wholly caller biomarkers,” Jain said. 

There is simply a cardinal flaw close present with precision medicine: the deficiency of high-quality, typical information connected pistillate bodies. “You can’t physique precision medicine for women connected information sets that ne'er adequately measured pistillate biology successful the archetypal place,” Jain said, citing however starring AI models often struggle to reply questions astir women’s health. 

“That’s wherefore I judge AI for women’s wellness needs to beryllium paired with caller biologic information astatine scale. AI tin assistance america place patterns crossed molecular signals, hormones, symptoms, treatments, fertility outcomes, and different biomarkers that accepted medicine has struggled to connect.”

In May, the institution started offering its ain AI adjunct called EvvyAI, which it bills arsenic an advisor for vaginal health. It translates the microbiome information that Evvy has collected into real-time guidance for users, and directs patients to clinicians for questions that request adept opinions.

When Evvy launched, Jain said it was with the content that she and the squad could leverage definite indicators successful the vaginal biome to “predict and amended outcomes crossed the pistillate lifespan,” she said. With that successful mind, the startup is besides present entering the fertility space, its archetypal large foray beyond vaginal health. 

Right now, the institution is inactive compiling information and science, specifically linking vaginal microbiomes to infertility, gynecological cancer, preterm birth, IVF occurrence rates, and recurrent gestation loss. The institution past twelvemonth launched a prospective survey leveraging its vaginal microbiome tests successful IVF clinics.

Hopefully, Jain said, collecting much information successful women’s wellness tin assistance the manufacture determination distant from the unexplained. “Women shouldn’t person to judge unexplained infertility, unexplained recurrence oregon unexplained symptoms arsenic answers erstwhile what they often mean is that medicine hasn’t caught up to the information yet.”

But things are improving. Besides Evvy, others successful the vaginal wellness abstraction see JunoBio, TinyHealth, and Daye. 

In the agelong term, Jain hopes that Evvy tin make a new-age Pap smear. “An at-home, non-invasive illustration that tin supply women with much regular, data-rich insights crossed infections, inflammation, fertility, PCOC, endometriosis, premenopause, HPV progression, and more,” she said.

“I don’t deliberation we tin hold for accepted probe methods to drawback up,” she said. “I judge women, arsenic patients, tin beryllium portion of pushing the manufacture forward.”