Evvy raises $40M Series B to expand vaginal microbiome data into fertility research

Evvy was launched in 2021 by Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek, and Pita Navarro. It operates what the company describes as the world’s only at-home CLIA-certified and CLEP-certified mNGS test to analyze vaginal microbes with one swab. Users mail swab samples to Evvy’s lab. The lab analyzes the results with 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.

Priyanka Jain, Evvy’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch that when a patient receives results, they are presented alongside a diagnosis, clinical interpretation and a clear path of next steps, including personalized prescription care when relevant.

Evvy says it now serves more than 100,000 patients across the United States and works with 3,000 practitioners. According to Jain, the company has generated 15 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts, identified novel bacterial vaginosis, or BV, subtypes, and discovered hundreds of previously uncatalogued vaginal microbiome genomes. Clinicians on Evvy can now use the collected data to offer personalized treatment to patients, she said.

Treating patients is only part of the company’s vision. Jain said Evvy’s larger goal is to build a dataset connecting microbiome biology, symptoms, interventions and health outcomes, creating a continuous feedback loop that can unlock improvements to care and the discovery of new biomarkers.

Jain described a fundamental flaw in precision medicine: the lack of high-quality, representative data on female bodies. She said it is not possible to build precision medicine for women on datasets that never adequately measured female biology in the first place, pointing to how leading AI models often struggle to answer questions about women’s health. She said AI for women’s health needs to be paired with new biological data at scale, and that AI can help identify patterns across molecular signals, hormones, symptoms, treatments, fertility outcomes and other biomarkers that traditional medicine has struggled to connect.

In May, Evvy began offering EvvyAI, an AI assistant it describes as an advisor for vaginal health. The company says the assistant translates microbiome data Evvy has collected into real-time guidance for users and directs patients to clinicians for questions that require expert opinions.

Evvy is now entering the fertility space, its first major foray beyond vaginal health. The company is still compiling data and science linking vaginal microbiomes to infertility, gynecological cancer, preterm birth, IVF success rates and recurrent pregnancy loss. Last year, it launched a prospective study using its vaginal microbiome tests in IVF clinics.

Jain said collecting more data in women’s health could 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,” she said.

Other companies in the vaginal health space include JunoBio, TinyHealth and Daye, according to TechCrunch. In the long term, Jain hopes 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.

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