Evvy raises $40m Series B to take its vaginal microbiome platform further into women’s health

CEO Priyanka Jain tells FutureFemHealth why Evvy is expanding into new areas of women’s health

Image: Evvy’s co-founder and CEO Priyanka Jain, co-founder and Chief Science Officer Pita Navarro, and co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Laine Bruzek

US-based Evvy has raised an oversubscribed $40m Series B as it looks to use its growing vaginal microbiome dataset to develop new diagnostic and care models across women’s health.

The round was led by Catalio Capital Management, with new investors US Fertility Innovation Fund, Rethink Impact, Muse Capital and Alumni Ventures. Existing investors including LabCorp Venture Fund, General Catalyst, Left Lane Capital, BBG Ventures, Amboy Street Ventures, Ingeborg and Foreground Capital also participated.

Founded in 2021 by Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek and Pita Navarro, Evvy has built a precision women’s health platform around vaginal microbiome testing. Its at-home testing uses metagenomic sequencing to analyse the vaginal microbiome, with results interpreted by licensed clinicians and used to inform personalised treatment where relevant.

The company has now served more than 100,000 patients and 3,000 practitioners - and believes the data generated through that platform could have applications far beyond vaginal health.

“Women hear ‘unexplained’ constantly - unexplained infertility, unexplained recurrence, unexplained pain,” co-founder and CEO Priyanka Jain said. “It’s stated like a diagnosis, when it really just means medicine wasn’t built to measure female biology.”

“We set out to build the datasets and AI infrastructure that precision medicine in women’s health has been missing.”

From vaginal health to a wider platform

Evvy describes its platform as the world’s only clinically validated vaginal microbiome platform. Its tests use CLIA-certified, NYS CLEP-approved metagenomic sequencing, with results ordered and interpreted by licensed clinicians.

The company is targeting an area where gaps in existing care remain significant. Evvy says patients with vaginal symptoms face misdiagnosis rates of more than 50% and recurrence rates above 60% in traditional care. Clinicians using its platform deliver a diagnosis to more than 90% of symptomatic patients, while its approach has reduced bacterial vaginosis recurrence by around 50%, with results validated in peer-reviewed research.

When Evvy raised its Series A in 2023, Priyanka says much of the work was focused on building the clinical platform around its test: interpreting results, improving diagnosis and matching patients with personalised treatment.

“We’ve kind of built the dataset now,” Priyanka explained to FutureFemHealth. “We’re kind of past the stage of saying there’s no data. Now we have the data. What can we do with it?”

Evvy says it has now built the world’s largest proprietary, clinical-grade dataset on the vaginal microbiome and women’s health outcomes, alongside machine-learning engine EvvyAI.

Now the company is looking beyond vaginal health, exploring how its platform could be applied to areas including fertility, preterm birth, cervical cancer progression, endometriosis and PCOS.

Fertility will be the first focus. Priyanka said it had organically become the fastest-growing reason patients and clinicians were coming to Evvy, alongside growing scientific interest in the relationship between the vaginal microbiome and fertility outcomes. More than 10,000 patients have come to Evvy specifically around fertility, she said.

The new funding will support clinical validation of EvvyAI-powered diagnostic and care models, alongside expansion through physicians and partner channels.

Longer term, Priyanka sees vaginal microbiome testing becoming much more routine. She told FutureFemHealth that women could eventually test once or twice a year, describing what Evvy is building as a potential “new age Pap smear” - something that could create a longitudinal picture of vaginal health rather than only being used when symptoms appear.

“The vaginal microbiome is a perfect example of […] a powerful, overlooked biomarker impacting fertility, preterm birth, gynecological cancers, and more,” Priyanka said.

“Evvy is building the evidence, infrastructure, and partnerships needed to make precision, data-driven care the standard for women’s health.”

Investors are also betting on the value of that data. Catalio co-founder and managing partner Jacob Vogelstein said the firm was attracted by Evvy’s growth alongside its “unique data and AI infrastructure”, describing its combination of proprietary data, clinical evidence and biomarker discovery as an “entirely new foundation for precision women’s healthcare”.

Breaking into later-stage capital

The $40m raise also puts Evvy among a relatively small group of women’s health companies to reach Series B - and brings another cohort of later-stage investors into the category.

Priyanka said the process reminded her of Evvy’s earliest fundraising, when much of the conversation involved educating investors about the scale of the women’s health opportunity and the vaginal microbiome itself.

By Series A, more early-stage investors were already familiar with the category. At Series B, Evvy was now making that case to a different group: later-stage growth investors that have had relatively few opportunities to see women’s health companies reach this level.

“You can probably count on two hands the number of women’s health companies that have ever raised a Series B,” Priyanka said.

Rather than seeing that as a barrier, Jain described each company that reaches this stage as helping to lay the groundwork and open up the later-stage investment market for those that follow.

“It definitely was not easy and required a lot of education that it might feel like, in the women’s health community [we] don’t need to do anymore,” she said.

“It made me realise: at the late stage, we’re still in the early days.”