Juno Bio raises $3.8 million for vaginal microbiome diagnostics

Juno Bio has raised $3.8 million to expand its vaginal microbiome testing business and open its first CLIA-certified sequencing lab in Oakland, California. The round was backed by Ada Ventures, Artesian, Entrepreneur First and Illumina Accelerator, and the company did not disclose a valuation or revenue.

The financing moves more of Juno Bio’s operations inside the company. Its new Oakland lab is dedicated to women’s health and will process tests that had previously been handled by outside providers, according to the company.

Juno Bio, founded in 2018 by Hana Janebdar and Dr. Leighton Turner, is built around the view that vaginal infection care is held back by weak diagnostics. The company says conventional testing can miss or blur conditions with overlapping symptoms, including bacterial vaginosis, yeast infections, aerobic vaginitis, cytolytic vaginosis and hormone-related changes.

Sequencing as clinical infrastructure

The company’s platform uses next-generation sequencing to look for about 10,000 bacteria and fungi, along with four common sexually transmitted infections. Juno Bio says that is broader than standard clinical tests, which generally target a smaller set of pathogens.

Juno Bio’s own clinical data is the basis for its strongest claim: 67.5% of patients who later used its platform had previously been misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed. The company also says only 13% had been successfully treated before using Juno Bio, and that about half had co-infections missed by conventional testing. Those figures come from the company, and the round announcement did not provide an independent validation study.

Since launching its first consumer test, Juno Bio says it has sold more than 20,000 kits and built one of the larger datasets focused on the vaginal microbiome. The company has expanded beyond wellness testing into clinical diagnostics, pharmaceutical research partnerships, telehealth and pharmacy integrations. Its latest test is pitched as its first product designed to support clinical decisions, rather than consumer information alone.

A crowded women’s health diagnostics field

Juno Bio is not the only startup trying to turn vaginal microbiome data into a clinical or commercial product. Evvy, based in New York, has raised $19 million, including a $14 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital, and also uses metagenomic sequencing for vaginal microbiome testing. Daye is pursuing diagnostics through a tampon-based sample collection method.

The distinction Juno Bio is drawing is go-to-market. The company is positioning itself less as a consumer wellness brand and more as infrastructure for providers and pharmaceutical researchers. Ada Ventures co-founding partner Check Warner said the firm is backing the company’s clinical infrastructure and work in an underserved category.

Janebdar said the funding will support expanded access to more actionable care and the company’s work on the gender health gap. The announcement did not say how many people Juno Bio employs, how the round was split among investors, or what milestones the company must hit before raising again.

The broader market context is favorable to the pitch. Grand View Research projects the global precision medicine market will rise from about $112 billion in 2025 to more than $207 billion by 2030, with genomics and personalized diagnostics contributing to that growth. Juno Bio’s round signals continued investor interest in applying those tools to reproductive and women’s health, where the commercial case still depends on proof that better testing changes care decisions at scale.

This story draws on original reporting from TechFundingNews.