After earning a Ph.D. in science and engineering from MIT, Alicia Jackson realized she didn't want to be in academia. A series of events led her jobs at Congress and DARPA — and eventually into entrepreneurship.
Jackson, 42, began studying early infertility and started seeing parallels to another hormonal imbalance that impacts many women: menopause. A lightbulb went off, leading her to found Evernow, a startup that provides telemedicine services for cis-women experiencing menopause and perimenopause, the transition period into menopause.
"We've just become so immune to it when it happens naturally, that we just see it as natural aging," Jackson, Evernow's CEO, told me. "Nobody ever talks about menopause as being this crucial moment in women's health when a bunch of things get triggered by this drop in estrogen and other hormones. It really does seem to trigger all these diseases of aging" from bone loss to cardiovascular disease to diabetes to Alzheimer's.
Women's health conditions are often dismissed as inevitable and normal despite being associated with pain and discomfort.
"All I could think was, ‘Oh my god, this is coming at me in a decade. What am I going to do?’" Jackson said.
On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based company announced a $28.5 million Series A round led by New Enterprise Associates that also included 8VC, Refactor Capital, Coelius Capital and several angel investors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz.
Evernow’s clinicians can prescribe progestin and estradiol hormone replacement therapy, or a low-dose SSRI like paroxetine for those who need a hormone-free treatment plan.
Members pay a monthly subscription fee from $75 to $129, depending on the medication prescribed, which is all-inclusive of prescriptions and unlimited virtual visits with a clinician.
After being assessed for eligibility, members are paired with a clinician — either an OBGYN or nurse practitioner with expertise in women's health. In the first 30 days, the clinician will check in with members several times to see how a treatment plan is going and determine whether medications need to be adjusted.
A one-month supply of generic estradiol patches retails for around $116, according to GoodRx.
Lots of women come to Evernow because they can't find a local doctor who specializes in menopause and perimenopause, Jackson said.
"My own mother has had this issue. I'm sure she had somebody but they were giving her inaccurate information based on outdated data," Jackson said. "Women should be seeing this as a specialty. This is not just, 'Oh I'm going to my annual exam.' You want someone that specializes in menopause."
The company has around three dozen employees. Jackson wants to hire 10 more people this year, and told me the company will be focused on serving more women and addressing an array of needs that women over 40 experience. That can include everything from hot flashes to mental health, nutrition, sleep, relationships and intimacy.
Evernow isn't disclosing how many users it has, but the company published a study Wednesday based on responses from 100,000 members. While every cis-woman goes through perimenopause and menopause, they experience it differently, often along ethnic lines.
More than 70% of respondents said their symptoms were severe to very severe, according to the study. Black women reported higher rates of symptoms and severity overall, Hispanic women were less affected by weight gain and Asian women experienced fewer night sweats and hot flashes.
The startup says it is submitting its research for peer-reviewed publication.
There are a dozen startups in the Bay Area that mention menopause in their descriptions at Crunchbase. Among them are Oakland-based Lisa Health, as well as San Francisco-based app The Cusp, though it shut down in December and had raised over $4 million in seed funding since 2018.
