London VC Ada Ventures backs $3.8m Juno Bio women's health round
London-based Ada Ventures has led a $3.8m seed round for Juno Bio, reflecting a broader European investor shift towards backing hard scientific infrastructure in historically underserved women's health markets.
Women’s health startup Juno Bio has secured $3.8 million in seed funding to build a clinical diagnostics platform, moving from consumer wellness tests into provider-led care. The round was led by London-based Ada Ventures, with participation from Artesian, Entrepreneur First and Illumina Accelerator.
The capital will fund the launch of a CLIA-certified sequencing laboratory in Oakland, California. It will also support a new clinical test for healthcare providers that screens for four common sexually transmitted infections and maps the broader community of vaginal bacteria and fungi.
Chronic vaginal health conditions drive significant, often hidden, healthcare costs across European health systems due to persistent misdiagnosis. Juno Bio’s internal data shows nearly 68% of its customers had been incorrectly diagnosed previously, and only 13% reported successful treatment, with around half suffering from multiple simultaneous infections that standard tests miss.
The investment highlights a notable shift in where venture capital is deploying money. Rather than consumer-facing digital health apps, investors are increasingly funding companies that build proprietary clinical infrastructure and data sets. By operating its own laboratory, Juno Bio can iterate on its technology faster and retain control over highly valuable clinical data.
“Juno Bio is setting a new standard for how vaginal health is understood and managed,” said Check Warner, Co-founding Partner at Ada Ventures. “What they’ve built at this stage, with this level of capital efficiency, is exceptional."
The company’s pivot to clinical care also reflects an evolving understanding of longevity medicine. While the sector typically focuses on biological aging clocks, addressing persistent, untreated infections and inflammation in women’s reproductive health is emerging as a critical component of preventive care.
Juno Bio has already sold more than 20,000 tests through its direct-to-consumer model. Hana Janebdar, the company’s cofounder and CEO, said the firm has spent five years building one of the largest repositories of vaginal microbiome data.
“This next chapter is about scaling that work, expanding access to more actionable care, and continuing to close the gender health gap,” Janebdar said.
“The vaginal microbiome is still one of the least understood systems in the body at a clinical scale,” added Dr Leighton Turner, cofounder and CSO. “With our lab, we’re starting to build a measurement standard that clinicians can actually use.”
