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

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.”