Evvy, a female-founded startup focused on vaginal health, picked up $14 million to scale up its precision health platform for women.
The health tech company launched its vaginal health test in 2021 before expanding its platform in February of this year to offer end-to-end care. Patients are connected through the platform to virtual health coaches so they may better understand the results of physician-reviewed vaginal health tests and personalized prescription treatment.
Along with the fresh capital, Evvy will be launching the addition of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and antibiotic resistance testing as an add-on panel to its vaginal health test. Priyanka Jain, CEO and co-founder of Evvy, told Fierce Healthcare that many patients came to the startup asking for STI care. Through the new addition, antibiotics being prescribed to treat STIs will be tailored to account for vaginal microbiome health.
“If you have a healthy, protected microbiome, what that’s doing is making it difficult for STIs or other pathogenic bacteria to survive,” Jain said. “The environment is too acidic, there’s no room for them. So by maintaining a healthy microbiome, research has shown that you’re reducing the chances of getting an STI in the first place. They’re so intimately related, microbiome and STIs, that it felt like we were missing a big part of the picture by not supporting people in both areas.”
The new funding round will be used to expand Evvy’s at-home testing and care platform, leverage artificial intelligence to explore molecular signatures for female health diagnosis and validate improved outcomes in fertility and pregnancy.
Investor Left Lane Capital led the series A round with participation from General Catalyst, Labcorp Venture Fund, RH Capital, Ingeborg Investments, G9 Ventures, Virtue and Amboy Street Ventures.
With Evvy’s new investor Labcorp, the health tech company hopes to leverage the raw data it has already acquired to determine whether there are specific markers that could point to novel point-of-care testing.
Evvy’s new STI offering will screen for a range of common STIs, including chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis. STIs have seen a steady increase in recent years. From 2017 to 2021, cases of gonorrhea increased roughly 28%, cases of syphilis grew by almost 74% and cases of congenital syphilis jumped by more than 203%.
Patients seeking STI testing with vaginal microbiome health in mind can access the provider directly or be referred to Evvy by their primary care physician or OB-GYN. At-home tests allow for the development of personalized treatment along with the expansion of data, filling what Jain calls the “gender health research gap.”
“We started with the data, with only the test,” Jain said. “We started with only what was classified as vaginitis in the healthcare system. There’s one ICD-10 code for all of vaginitis. We were seeing 70 different permutations of the specific microbes that were present and how that related to whether the patient was in menopause or postpartum. Turns out precision medicine requires data.”
A miniscule 4% of overall funding for research and development for healthcare products and services goes to women’s health.
Evvy has also seen trends of patients unable to find support in the larger medical system when addressing bacterial vaginosis (BV), the most common cause of vaginal symptoms among women.
It is estimated that the prevalence of BV among women between the ages of 14 to 49 is 29.9%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite the prevalence of the infection, research has yet to determine how sexual activity affects the development of vaginal symptoms although it has been found to rarely affect those who are not sexually active.
Those with untreated BV have been found to have an increased chance of getting an STI. Pregnant people with untreated BV are more likely to give birth early and have a baby at a low birth weight. The vaginal microbiome has also been tied to gynecological cancers.
“We’re thinking about how our platform can be leveraged in these specific cases where we know the vaginal microbiome plays a role,” Jain said. “When it comes to things like fertility and pregnancy, we know that having a healthy vaginal microbiome is associated with better outcomes.”
Single tests come in at $129 and give a snapshot of a patient’s vaginal microbiome. Patients can also become members for a fee of $99 a test for four annual tests in order to track vaginal health changes. Each test includes access to one-on-one virtual coaching.
An additional panel identifying STIs, the presence of 11 vaginal microbes and 17 antibiotic-resistance genes can be added to any test for an additional $119. These tests return results faster, between one and three days, as patients wait for Evvy's other tests, which can take seven to 10 days to garner results.
If a patient is determined to have a vagina in dysbiosis, Evvy physicians design a treatment plan including supplements or medication for patients in addition to two calls with a certified health coach.
An Evvy IRB-approved study (PDF) found that within two months of treatment, 83% of participants acquired a healthy microbiome, 96% of patients determined their treatment to be effective and 100% said their symptoms improved.
There's a growing list of startups focused on women's health, targeting everything from pregnancy and fertility to menopause. And there are now a handful specifically targeting vaginal health, such as at-home vaginal microbiome testing company Juno Bio and Stix, which offers UTI and yeast infection treatments. Wisp is another online sexual health company, while Hims & Hers also offers sexual health testing and care for women.