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What if checking the vaginal microbiome became a routine part of women’s healthcare?
Priyanka Jain thinks women could eventually do it once or twice a year.
“We’re building what I would describe as the new age Pap smear,” the Evvy co-founder told me.
That sounds ambitious for a category that, until quite recently, has sat mainly in the consumer testing and wellness world - and is still surrounded by plenty of stigma and taboo.
But Evvy’s $40m Series B this week made me wonder how far away from that future the market actually is.
The company has now served more than 100,000 patients. Women have shown they will pay to understand their vaginal health. Investors are now putting significant institutional capital behind companies building in it. And, importantly, companies are starting to build the clinical evidence that could make vaginal microbiome data more useful to healthcare too.
The vaginal microbiome is the community of bacteria and other microorganisms living in the vagina. Its composition matters because a healthy vaginal microbiome is protective, while disruption has been associated with common conditions such as bacterial vaginosis and with wider reproductive and gynaecological health, including fertility.
Until now, women have mainly sought out tests themselves to get answers to recurrent BV, thrush or other symptoms - especially when those answers haven’t been easy to get elsewhere.
But we’re starting to understand that the microbiome could tell us much more than that too. And across the market, companies are starting to work out what you can actually do with that information.
Last week, Good Clean Clinical Care launched a model combining microbiome testing with specialist care and personalised treatments. Earlier this year, Juno Bio opened a CLIA-certified lab after raising $3.8m. And Daye has been combining tampon-based sample collection with testing across the vaginal microbiome, HPV and STIs.
Then you have companies including Freya Biosciences, Osel and Gedea Biotech developing treatments that act on the vaginal microbiome.
So what comes next?
If the first wave of this market was about giving women a way to measure their vaginal microbiome, the next question is what happens when that information starts becoming part of healthcare.
In this week’s FutureFemHealth Pro, I’m looking at where the vaginal microbiome market goes next:
More than $160m in disclosed investment and grant funding since 2022 - and where it’s going
How companies are moving beyond consumer testing into diagnostics, clinical care and therapeutics - and what it would take to become part of routine healthcare
Where the real value could sit if testing itself is only the starting point