Women's health startup Evvy raises $40M to expand microbiome research

Women’s health company Evvy said Tuesday it has raised a $40 million Series B led by Catalio Capital Management. Launched in 2021 by Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek, and Pita Navarro, Evvy is best known for what it touts as the world’s only at-home CLIA-certified and CLEP-certified mNGS test to analyze vaginal microbes from a single swab. Users mail in samples, which Evvy’s lab analyzes with its own mNGS sequencing before sending results to clinicians on its platform for review and posting them in the patient’s online 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.

Evvy says it now serves more than 100,000 patients across the U.S. and works with 3,000 practitioners, and that it has generated 15 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts, identified novel BV subtypes, and discovered hundreds of previously uncatalogued vaginal microbiome genomes. Jain said the company’s bigger goal is building a dataset connecting microbiome biology, symptoms, interventions, and health outcomes to create a continuous feedback loop that improves care and helps discover new biomarkers — necessary, she argued, because precision medicine has never had adequate data on female biology. “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 women’s-health questions.

In May, Evvy began offering an AI assistant called EvvyAI that translates microbiome data into real-time guidance for users and directs them to clinicians for questions needing expert opinion. The company is now expanding into fertility, its first major push beyond vaginal health; it is still compiling data and science linking vaginal microbiomes to infertility, gynecological cancer, preterm birth, IVF success rates, and recurrent pregnancy loss, and last year launched a prospective study using its tests in IVF clinics. Other companies in the vaginal-health space include Juno Bio, Tiny Health, and Daye.

Why it matters

Evvy’s bet is that a large, structured dataset on female biology — something precision medicine has historically lacked — can eventually explain conditions doctors currently label “unexplained,” from infertility to recurrent pregnancy loss.