we offer guidance, we just look at the objective evidence,” says Murdoc Khaleghi, the startup’s chief medical officer. “This is all peer-reviewed, well-respected evidence among medical specialists. We’ll even refer the articles and literature around those markers so customers can take a deep dive.”
Three months into the company’s beta, EverlyWell says it has 1,500 customers—85 percent are women—in 45 states. Fifteen percent of those customers have ordered multiple test kits, Cheek says. EverlyWell, she adds, offers a cheaper and more simple option for many of the routine tests you’d do in a doctor’s office.
She says EverlyWell’s group of health and wellness test kits is the natural progression of health-related tests that consumers take at home, from pregnancy tests and HIV tests in the last 20 years, to genetic tests more recently.
The high-profile implosion of Theranos has brought testing companies additional scrutiny, but Cheek says EverlyWell has felt no impact because the startup uses existing, widely accepted testing methods, and that all of its network labs have proper federal certifications under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). “The customer wants to know, is this as accurate as what our doctors order,” she says. “The answer is yes. We’ve been very transparent.”
EverlyWell was originally founded in Dallas, but Cheek says she moved the company to Austin following advice from investors in the startup’s seed round in February. A former executive at MoneyGram in Dallas, Cheek says she was inspired to found EverlyWell last year when she had a period of unexplainable chronic fatigue and aches and pains.
“I saw five different specialists who couldn’t figure it out,” she says. “I ended up with a $2,000 bill and a stack of papers that were difficult to read.”
