Genie Fertility Raises $1.22M to Develop the World’s First Non-Invasive Uterine Diagnostic Using Menstrual Blood

October 7, 2025

Genie Fertility, the London-based reproductive health biotech, raised $1.22 million (£908,000) in pre-seed funding and launched from stealth in October 2025. The round was backed by Tiny VC, 33East VC, Arben Ventures, Transpose Platform, and Entrepreneur First. The capital will fund a nine-month longitudinal clinical trial collecting data on pregnancy outcomes, based on the novel fertility markers identified in Genie’s machine learning model. Genie Fertility was founded by CEO Anoushka Menon, a geneticist with degrees from Cambridge and UCL who previously launched women’s health products at Thriva and worked at The Lowdown, and CTO Dr Andreas Hadjimitsis, an Imperial College alumnus whose PhD focused on computational and wet-lab approaches for diagnostic applications. The pair met at the Entrepreneur First accelerator in May 2024.

Infertility affects approximately one in six couples globally and represents one of the most significant gaps in reproductive medicine. The gold-standard treatment, in vitro fertilisation (IVF), fails 73% of the time across all cycles — a statistic that has barely changed over decades of protocol refinement. Most of the analytical attention in IVF has focused on sperm quality, egg quality, and embryo grading; the uterine environment — the third critical component of successful implantation — has received comparatively little diagnostic investment. The only existing method to assess the uterine lining is an endometrial biopsy: an invasive, expensive procedure that samples a small part of the lining and provides limited accuracy.

Genie Fertility’s insight is that menstrual blood — the monthly shedding of the entire uterine lining — contains a rich and largely unexplored dataset about the health of the uterus. Unlike a standard blood draw, which contains systemic biomarkers, menstrual blood is specific to the uterine environment and contains molecular markers — proteins, RNA, cell-free DNA, metabolites — that reflect its functional state. Until Genie, this source has been underexplored because of limited scientific knowledge of menstrual blood’s molecular composition and a broader deficit of research investment in women’s reproductive health. Genie’s machine learning platform, trained on data from over 200,000 fertility patients, has identified novel predictive markers of uterine health in menstrual blood that correlate with implantation success and can be improved through existing clinical interventions.

The commercial application is a non-invasive diagnostic test, offered on day one of a patient’s fertility journey alongside standard workup, that provides a baseline assessment of uterine health and can be repeated after medical interventions to track change. Clinical studies began in March 2025, with 60 patients already enrolled. Medical advisors from Imperial College London, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne support the scientific development. Beyond fertility, Genie’s platform has potential applications in diagnostics and therapeutics for PCOS, endometriosis, and perimenopause — conditions that collectively affect hundreds of millions of women globally and have been historically neglected in medical research. As Dr Hadjimitsis summarised: “IVF is the gold standard for infertility, but it fails 73% of the time and requires urgent innovation. A lot of the focus in fertility has been on sperm, egg and embryo health. We want to create a world where the uterus gets the same attention.”

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