Women’s healthcare company Cercle has raised $6m in seed funding to advance its AI-driven health data platform.
Cercle’s platform uses AI to organise large amounts of de-identified healthcare data, currently focusing on fertility.
Since its inception in November 2023, the platform – dubbed the Cercle Biomedical Graph – has been used by US Fertility, Boston IVF, and Eurofins Genoma.
According to the company, the platform is consistent with US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines and maintains data privacy and security under HIPAA standards.
San Francisco-headquartered Cercle said the funding will be used to support expansion beyond the fertility market, develop the platform, and enhance its large language model (LLM) capabilities. The company aims to broaden its customer base across a range of women’s healthcare spaces, including menopause, women’s oncology, and rare diseases that disproportionately impact women.
The $6m seed round was led by the Outsiders Fund, with additional participation from FemHealth Ventures, CGHealth Ventures and Rogue Women’s Fund. It also received investment from former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg and her husband Tom Bernthal’s venture fund, which led Cercle’s $4.2m pre-seed round when it launched in November 2023.
The space that has become popularly known as “femtech” encompasses software and services that use technology tailored towards women's health. The industry has historically seen a lack of innovation and funding due to low awareness and investment.
However, awareness and investment in this space are on the rise. Investment in women’s health increased by 350% between 2020 and 2023, highlighting the growing interest in the market in recent years. In February 2024, the US White House and Dr Jill Biden released $100m in federal funding towards women’s health as part of the White House Initiative on women’s health research.
Cercle’s chief operations officer Ashley Finch said: “Women’s healthcare is under-researched, underfunded, and underserved. Our mission at Cercle is simple and clear: to leverage the power of AI to generate insights from women’s health data to drive efficiencies for providers, develop drugs faster, and improve care for patients.”
According to a report on GlobalData’s Medical Intelligence Center, AI in the medical market was worth $336m in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.1% to $1.2bn by 2027.
