For five years, the founders of Evvy have been building a company with two distinct parts—and phases—of its business. Evvy is best known as a consumer brand that offers at-home testing for vaginal health, helping to treat conditions including UTIs and perimenopause. But the company has always had a broader mission to take its dataset from 100,000 patients’ vaginal microbiomes and use it to better understand women’s health.
Today, Fortune is the first to report, Evvy is taking its next step toward that phase two. The startup raised a $40 million Series B round, led by the firm Catalio Capital Management, which invests in novel diagnostics.
“There’s so much third-party research showing that the vaginal microbiome plays a role in so much of women’s health, and we finally have built the dataset to really answer those questions,” says cofounder and CEO Priyanka Jain.
Evvy has already begun tapping its data for this kind of research, and as it builds out this capability it will focus on the fertility space first. One project takes samples from patients in IVF clinics, with the goal of identifying if novel markers of infection and inflammation are predictive of implantation success or failure. The company has published studies on its test methodology and how its precision medicine can improve patient outcomes. With this funding, it wants to validate some studies it has in the works and continue to do more.
As Jain and her cofounders went out to raise this time around, they encountered two major challenges. First, while women’s health is now well-understood as a category among early-stage investors, growth investors haven’t all caught up. “I felt almost like I was back in 2020,” Jain says. “We’re kind of in that early crop of companies that are graduating to that stage, and there was a lot of education to do.”
Second, investors often wanted Evvy to pick a lane—consumer or biotech. “So many of the consumer investors were like, ‘You have this amazing brand, women love you, why don’t you just become a supplements company? Why are you doing all of this research?'” Jain remembers. “And then we had all these biotech investors who were like, ‘You have the most amazing dataset. There’s so much you can do with all of this data. What’s consumer, and why are you spending your time on that?'”
Evvy is planning to keep doing both. In addition to building out its research capability, the Series B round will scale the Evvy consumer brand, especially in places like doctors’ offices.
And for other women’s health companies that are graduating to growth stage next—investors have gotten at least one crash course in the category now.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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