Evvy Raises $40M For Vaginal Microbiome Testing Data

The Standard Of Care Is Free, Fast, And Often Wrong

To understand why that map got built by a startup, look at what happens when a woman walks into a clinic with vaginal symptoms. The standard diagnostic is the Amsel criteria, which Jain walks through with the weariness of someone who has explained it many times. A clinician asks about symptoms, checks vaginal pH, examines a swab under a microscope, then mixes a sample with solution, and smells it for a fishy odor. That last step is called the whiff test. If three of four tests are positive, the patient gets a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

Vaginitis drives more than 10 million office visits a year and is the most common reason women see a primary care provider for a gynecologic issue. Bacterial vaginosis, its leading cause, affects an estimated 29.2% of US women of reproductive age, or roughly 21 million women. Yet the test that diagnoses it has barely changed in decades. Jain argues that is precisely the problem.

“So here’s the problem: That costs no one anything,” she noted. “That is free. And so when you’re competing with $0, it’s a little bit difficult to get reimbursement.”

This inverts the usual story of medical innovation. The obstacle is not an expensive incumbent defending its margin. It is a cheap, fast, inaccurate ritual that costs payers nothing, which makes it nearly impossible to displace no matter how strong the evidence against it. Evvy’s test runs about $150 and screens for over 700 bacteria and fungi. The PCR panels a doctor might order check three to five organisms. Jain says patients whose insurance rejects those claims can be left with a $900 bill.

What Forty Million Dollars Actually Buys

Evvy now serves more than 100,000 patients and 3,000 practitioners. Its platform has produced 13 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts. Its reference database draws on over 150,000 vaginal microbiome samples. Those numbers matter less than what the investors said they were buying.

“Its combination of proprietary data, clinical evidence, and a growing biomarker discovery engine creates an entirely new foundation for precision women’s healthcare,” said Jacob Vogelstein, co-founder and managing partner at Catalio Capital in New York.

Labcorp’s venture fund returned for this round, which is notable given that Labcorp sells conventional vaginitis panels. Both sides describe the relationship as collaborative rather than competitive, with joint work underway on research and commercialization.

“Their proprietary dataset on the vaginal microbiome has the potential to advance diagnostics and care for conditions that have long been underrecognized and underserved,” said Megann Vaughn Watters, vice president of new ventures and strategic alliances at Labcorp.

Read those two statements together. One of the largest clinical laboratories in the country and a diagnostics-focused biotech fund both identified the same asset, but neither named the test.

The Genomes Are Not In Any Public Database

Before this work, the largest public collection of metagenome-assembled genomes contained 151 from the vagina out of more than 150,000 overall. Public science, in other words, had almost nothing. Evvy’s sequencing has since identified hundreds of previously uncatalogued vaginal genomes that are not deposited in NCBI or any other public repository.

Jain is direct about why. “The argument for keeping it private is that that is the value of our company,” she explained, adding that investors need to believe biological data on women is worth something.

She is equally direct that the picture is not simply proprietary. “It’s not to say we don’t share the data. We often do,” she pointed out, describing academic partnerships on Gardnerella and on UTI recurrence that generate no financial return to Evvy. Patients opt into research separately from buying the test, and 96% of them do. Evvy does not license the raw dataset, though Jain says it would license specific validated biomarker signatures to companies better positioned to bring them to market.

One Consent Question Remains Open

Patients can withdraw from research at any time. Published studies cannot be retracted and, when asked whether withdrawal removes a patient’s data from a model already trained on it, Jain said: “it would be removed in the next update of the model.”

Why So Few Women’s Health Companies Get This Far

Of 604 funded women’s health companies, only 30% reached Series B, according to Tracxn. Each stage thins the field. The drop-off frustrates Jain, who says the companies that fall out are not weak on science. “I think that points to the fact that there is absolutely a cliff, and it is a cliff that we must solve.”

What makes the cliff frustrating is that the problem is not the companies. It is who is on the other side of the table. “I felt like I was having a lot of those same conversations again, just with a totally different group of people,” she said, describing pitches where late-stage investors were learning for the first time that women were not required in clinical research until 1993.

Jain’s prescription is blunt: “We just have to talk about women’s health as money.”

What Comes Next

Evvy will pursue clinical validation across conditions the company sizes at more than $180 billion in underserved outcomes, spanning menopause, fertility, PMOS, endometriosis, gynecologic cancers, and preterm birth. Jain’s longer ambition is to make microbiome testing routine rather than reactive, a richer annual counterpart to the Pap smear.

“I hope that in five years it is a test everyone’s doing every year, but we have to earn the right to get there,” she said.

The map is being drawn. Who gets to read it remains unsettled.