Women's health startup Evvy raises $40m to expand microbiome testing

Women's health startup Evvy has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round to expand its at-home vaginal microbiome testing and scale its AI-enabled diagnostics platform.

The investment, led by Catalio Capital Management, brings in new backers including the U.S. Fertility Innovation Fund, Rethink Impact, Muse Capital, and Alumni Ventures. Existing investors, including LabCorp Venture Fund, General Catalyst, and Left Lane Capital, also participated.

Evvy, officially incorporated as Allora Health Inc., was launched in 2021 by Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek, and Pita Navarro. The company is built around a simple at-home swab kit. Users mail their samples to Evvy’s certified laboratory, which uses metagenomic sequencing to map the vaginal microbiome. The results are analysed, reviewed by clinicians on the platform, and sent to the patient with a clinical interpretation and, if needed, a personalised prescription treatment plan.

Addressing the data gap

The startup is trying to plug a massive historical gap in medical research. Clinical trials in the US routinely excluded women until 1993, meaning modern medicine has only about 30 years of dedicated research into female biology.

"You can’t build precision medicine for women on datasets that never adequately measured female biology in the first place," CEO Priyanka Jain said. This lack of data has left patients facing high rates of misdiagnosis, with chronic symptoms often dismissed by doctors as "unexplained".

To bridge this gap, Evvy has spent five years building a clinical-grade dataset of vaginal microbiome profiles and health outcomes. The company says it has served more than 100,000 patients and works with 3,000 healthcare practitioners.

Its data has already helped researchers identify six distinct subtypes of bacterial vaginosis (BV) — a condition with a typical recurrence rate of over 60% — and discover hundreds of previously uncatalogued vaginal genomes. The company claims that clinicians using its platform, which includes an AI tool called EvvyAI, have seen a 50% reduction in BV recurrence rates.

Moving into fertility

The new capital will fund Evvy’s expansion into fertility, its first major step beyond vaginal infections. The startup is currently gathering data to link the vaginal microbiome to IVF success rates, recurrent pregnancy loss, and unexplained infertility. Last year, it launched a study tracking patient microbiomes inside IVF clinics.

Ultimately, Jain wants to turn the technology into a modern alternative to traditional screening. "In the long term, I hope that Evvy can create a new-age Pap smear," Jain said, describing an at-home test that could screen for infections, inflammation, endometriosis, and HPV progression.