Tiny Health

Tiny Health

File:Tiny Health logo.png
Type	Corporation
ISIN	🆔
Industry	Health Technology & Research
Founded 📆	2020
Founder 👔	Cheryl Sew Hoy
Area served 🗺️	US & International
Products 📟	PRO, Gut, Vaginal Health Test
Members
Number of employees
🌐 Website	www.tinyhealth.com
📇 Address
📞 telephone

Tiny Health is a U.S.-based health technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that provides microbiome testing for infants, children, and adults. Founded in 2020 by entrepreneur Cheryl Sew Hoy, the company offers at-home gut and vaginal tests using Shotgun metagenomic sequencing, as well as stool chemistry tests for healthcare providers... Its platform provides reports that analyze the microbiome composition based on test results.

History

Tiny Health was founded in 2020 by Cheryl Sew Hoy, who was motivated by her child's health issues . Tiny Health launched its at-home Baby Gut Health Test in 2022 Since then, the company has expanded its offerings to include microbiome tests for pregnancy/ postpartum, childhood, adulthood, and vaginal health. Tiny Health’s tests analyze microbial strains and their functional insights, with results intended for use by families and healthcare practitioners. In 2023, The Washington Post profiled Tiny Health in an article on the rise of direct-to-consumer medical testing, noting a customer who had turned to the company’s tests after other medical options had not resolved their condition . Tiny Health raised $8.5 million in a Series A funding round in 2024 and launched its B2B platform, Powered by Tiny. In 2025, Tiny Health expanded its availability to the European Union, Canada, and Mexico through B2B partnerships and was recognized as 'Start-up of the Year' by NutraIngredients-USA .

Funding

Prior to its Series A, Tiny Health raised approximately US$4.5 million in seed funding, led by TheVentureCity, to launch its first at-home microbiome test for expecting parents and infants. In March 2024, Axios reported that Tiny Health raised an additional US$8.5 million in a Series A round led by Spero Ventures with participation from Overwater Ventures, Next Coast Ventures, Peterson Ventures, and others. Forbes highlighted the company’s decision to include customers as investors, noting that 25 percent of the round was funded by Tiny Health users. These rounds brought Tiny Health’s total disclosed funding to about US$13 million, preceding the launch of its B2B platform and expansion into the European Union, Canada, and Mexico.

Leadership

Founder and CEO Cheryl Sew Hoy

Cheryl Sew Hoy is the founder and CEO of Tiny Health. She holds a bachelor's degree in Operations Research & Industrial Engineering and a master's degree in Engineering Management and Data Mining from Cornell University. Before founding Tiny Health, Sew Hoy co-founded Reclip.It, which was acquired by Walmart Labs in 2013, and served as the founding CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC).. In 2022, CNBC interviewed Sew Hoy about her approach to entrepreneurship and parenting in the context of leading Tiny Health.

Chief Medical Officer Dr. Elisa Song, MD

Elisa Song is a pediatrician trained at Stanford, NYU, and UCSF.,. She is the founder of the parenting resource Healthy Kids Happy Kids and the author of Healthy Kids, Happy Kids: An Integrative Pediatrician’s Guide to Whole Child Resilience (2024).Pediatrician’s Guide to Whole Child Resilience |publisher=Harvest |location=New York |year=2024 |isbn=978-0-358-75117-5}}</ref>.

Products and services

Tiny Health offers at-home gut and vaginal microbiome testing for all ages, including options used by healthcare practitioners. Its tests use shotgun metagenomic sequencing to analyze microbial species, strains, and functions, providing users with personalized recommendations and downloadable reports that can be shared with providers . The company initially focused on the first 1000 days and has expanded to cover longevity, menopause markers, GLP-1 production, and other metrics to track gut health across all life stages, including pregnancy . Tiny Health provides testing through memberships and baseline tests. In 2024, Fortune listed the Baby Gut Health Test among its “25 Top Recommended Products for Your Health and Wellness” .

Technology

Tiny Health analyzes human stool and vaginal samples using shotgun metagenomic sequencing, which captures the genetic content of a microbial community . This method allows for the identification of microbes at the strain level and the analysis of their functional pathways. The company’s bioinformatics pipeline has been validated against established performance benchmarks. It utilizes age-stratified reference cohorts, which include data from infants, children, adults, pregnant women, and those in later life . Building on peer-reviewed research and its own clinical datasets, Tiny Health scientists have developed quantitative markers, including a Gut Maturation Index that models infant microbiome development, indicators of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) synthesis, urolithin A production capacity, microbiome summary score, and microbiome signatures associated with menopause and cardiovascular-related metabolic pathways . The platform is utilized in both internal clinical trials and consumer testing programs, with findings reported in microbiome literature .

Powered by Tiny

Powered by Tiny is Tiny Health’s business-to-business (B2B) division, operating across three main areas:

Wholesale and co-branding

Powered by Tiny partners with health and wellness companies, health systems, and clinics specializing in chronic care and longevity to provide Tiny Health’s proprietary shotgun metagenomic testing to their members and patients. Partners include Superpower, Mito Health, and Begin Health .

Health care practice (HCP)

This division supports clinicians and practices by providing Tiny Health’s clinical-grade PRO Gut Health Test, Gut Health Test, and Vaginal Health Test . It’s utilized in several specialized areas, including fertility, hormonal health, and longevity, supporting clinical workflows through practitioner-facing tools. Services include educational resources on result interpretation and continuing education (CE/CME) presentations .

The company’s PRO Gut Health Test can only be ordered by licensed healthcare practitioners. The test includes microbial analysis and measures stool chemistry markers related to digestion, absorption, inflammation, and immune response in the gut . Through distribution and diagnostic partners such as Rupa Health, Evexia Diagnostics, and Nordic Laboratories, Tiny Health tests are available to 28,000 healthcare practitioners internationally .

Clinical study collaborations

The company collaborates with contract research organizations (CROs) to facilitate clinical research initiatives utilizing Tiny Health’s tests, including those that have been IRB-approved .

Research and clinical applications

Tiny Health supports research into the microbiome and its relationship to long-term health. The company has launched IRB-approved studies on topics such as food allergies and sensitivities, infant microbiome interventions, vaginal microbiome and fertility outcomes, HMO supplementation, and aging microbiome. In 2025, Tiny Health researchers published a peer-reviewed, randomized controlled trial in Pediatric Allergy and Immunology examining a six-month gut health support program for babies born by C-section. The intervention group showed lower eczema rates (6%) compared to the control group (29%). Additional findings included a higher abundance of *Bifidobacterium* in the intervention group (82% vs. 55%), increased presence of genes for digesting breast milk compounds, and lower "C-section index" values indicating gut microbiome patterns more similar to vaginally-born babies . The same year, Tiny Health researchers and collaborators published a review article in Gut Microbes examining current evidence linking the infant gut microbiome to childhood health outcomes. The review highlights how early microbial colonization—shaped by birth mode, feeding practices, antibiotic exposure, and maternal factors—may influence the risk of chronic conditions, including asthma, eczema, diabetes, and obesity. The authors also call for improved research practices, such as standardized stool collection, updated sequencing technologies, and larger longitudinal cohorts, to advance the field. In partnership with Chiyo, Tiny Health released a research paper demonstrating that Chiyo's Prenatal Nurture Program supports both maternal health and gut microbiome composition. The study found notable decreases in pregnancy complication-associated bacterial species. The research contributes to the growing understanding of nutrition's role in maternal health outcomes and intergenerational health transmission through microbiome composition . Tiny Health has also collaborated on research led by Mira Care in a 2024 study examining the relationship between PCOS and gut health in 366 women . The company benchmarks its taxonomic classification pipeline against industry standards such as Kraken2 and MetaPhlAn4, reporting precision, recall, and F1 metrics to ensure analytical accuracy. It uses age-stratified reference cohorts to interpret microbial features in the development of its proprietary condition-linked indices, such as the C-section signature, resilience markers, and functional gene profiles .

Advisory board

Tiny Health is supported by a group of medical and scientific advisors with expertise in gastroenterology, pediatrics, microbial genomics, epidemiology, and women’s health. These advisors provide clinical and research insights that inform the company’s scientific direction and product development.

Members of Tiny Health’s scientific and medical advisory board include:

• Taylor Sittler, MD, a board-certified pathologist, angel investor, and co-founder of Color Health. He also co-founded The Cusp, and currently serves as a board director at Tiny Health..
• Emeran Mayer, MD, Executive Director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience at UCLA and author of The Mind-Gut Connection;.
• Qian Yuan, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Co-Director of the Food Allergy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital;
• Meghan Azad, PhD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Child Health at the University of Manitoba and Deputy Director of the CHILD Cohort Study;.
• Ruben Mars, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, specializing in the gut microbiome.

Awards

• Tiny Health named NutraIngredients-USA Start-up of the Year 2025

• Mira’s Hormone Innovator Award for Integrative Impact 2025

• Global Health & Pharma's Biotechnology & Lifesciences Awards 2025

• Rising Star Quarterfinalist in the Kids Health category at the 2024 Digital Health Hub Foundation Awards

• 2023 Probiota Americas Pioneers

External links

• Official website
• Tiny Health on LinkedIn
• Tiny Health on Instagram

See also

• Gut microbiome
• Shotgun sequencing
• Metagenomics
• Probiotics

References

This article "Tiny Health" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Tiny Health. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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