Evvy, an artificial intelligence startup that’s looking to enhance women’s healthcare, said today it has closed on $40 million in Series B funding to scale its precision diagnostics and care platform.
The round was led by Catalio Capital Management, with new investors including the U.S. Fertility Innovation Fund, Rethink Impact, Muse Capital and Alumni Ventures participating. Previous backers such as LabCorp Venture Fund, General Catalyst, Left Lane Capital and others also joined in.
Evvy, officially known as Allora Health Inc., says it’s trying to address a massive gap that exists within women’s healthcare. Precision medicine refers to the concept of using biological markers to tailor treatments to individuals, and the approach has been transformative in many areas. But when it comes to women’s health, it has hardly made a dent.
The startup’s co-founder and Chief Executive Priyanka Jain told SiliconANGLE that the biological signals unique to female bodies have been overlooked by most medical researchers. As a result, women have to deal with misdiagnosis rates higher than 50% for some conditions, while the recurrence rate of common vaginal symptoms is more than 60%.
“Women hear ‘unexplained’ constantly, whether it’s unexplained infertility, unexplained recurrence, unexplained pain,” Jain said. “It’s stated like a diagnosis, when it really means medicine wasn’t built to measure female biology.”
According to Jain, the problem stems from the fact that clinical trials of new drugs generally excluded women until 1993, so there’s only about 30 years of research data regarding the study of female biology. “For a long time, women were considered to be “small men,” from a medical and research standpoint, erasing the many ways that the female body is distinct, down to the cellular level,” she said. “That gap compounds over time: When you don’t study female biology, you don’t identify the biomarkers that could explain what’s happening, and when you don’t have those biomarkers, symptoms get labeled as ‘unexplained.'”
Female bodies are misunderstood
This is very often the case for vaginal health in particular. Jain said the microbiome relating to this is incredibly important and complex, but has historically been reduced to only a handful of organisms or broad diagnoses. “We founded Evvy because we believe the female body shouldn’t be a medical mystery,” she said. “There are enormous opportunities to discover the diagnostic and therapeutic tools women have been missing by studying female biology.”
Evvy believes that AI can help to prevent these misdiagnoses and recurrences, and that’s why it has spent more than five years building what Jain says is the world’s largest clinical-grade dataset on the vaginal microbiome and women’s health outcomes. Jain said the company offers an at-home testing kit that relies on metagenomic sequencing. Using the kit, patients can take a swab and the biological data that results will be fed into a machine learning engine called EvvyAI that tries to understand the symptoms they’re experiencing.
EvvyAI will analyze the data from the swab and then match each patient with a personalized prescription treatment plan. It’s designed to get more accurate over time, too, because it continuously learns from the insights it gleans from each new test. “We set out to build the datasets and AI infrastructure that precision medicine in women’s health has been missing,” Jain added.
Ultimately, Evvy wants to build the infrastructure, partnerships and data points required to make precision medicine the new standard for women’s health, and it has made significant progress towards that goal so far. Licensed clinicians that use EvvyAI for diagnoses report successfully diagnosing more than 90% of symptomatic patients, leading to a 50% reduction in the recurrence of conditions like bacterial vaginosis.
BV, as it’s known, is a prime example of the potential EvvyAI holds. Through its analysis of women’s microbiomes, it found that many BV patients who appeared to be similar under traditional diagnostic criteria actually had meaningfully different biomes, recurrence patterns and responses to treatments. “We have identified six distinct BV subtypes and can now support far more personalized treatment pathways,” Jain said.
Fertility is next
The startup has already scaled its technology to serve more than 100,000 patients at 3,000 medical practitioners so far. Moreover, its dataset has been cited in 13 peer-reviewed publications and helped researchers to discover new bacterial subtypes and hundreds of previously uncatalogued vaginal microbiome genomes. It’s now in expansion mode, and will use the funding from today’s round to validate a new generation of AI-enabled diagnostic and care models that can handle a broader range of women’s health conditions.
Its first goal is to tackle fertility issues, Jain said. The startup is keen to tackle this area first because it is an especially complex challenge, where the vaginal microbiome is only one piece of a much larger biological system.
“It’s an important and actionable biological signal, but it’s not the only one,” Jain explained. “Our goal is to enable doctors to access accurate vaginal microbiome results with relevant clinical interpretations so that they can incorporate these into a fertility patient’s broader care plan. We will be sharing more about our findings in this space later this year.”
Catalio Capital Managing Partner Jacob Vogelstein said he was drawn to Evvy by the unique data and AI infrastructure it has built. “Its combination of proprietary data, clinical evidence and a growing biomarker discovery engine creates an entirely new foundation for precision women’s healthcare,” he said.
