Health AI startup Cercle launches with backing from Sheryl Sandberg to advance women’s healthcare

Cercle, a new artificial intelligence (AI) health tech startup, today announced its official launch to advance women’s healthcare, with emphasis on fertility care, an area that historically lacks sufficient funding and research.

In addition to the launch, Cercle also announced it has partnered with major investors, including lead investors Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s former COO, and her husband Tom Bernthal through their new venture fund. As we reported last year, Sandberg stepped down from her role as Facebook’s Meta COO in June of 2022. Here new fund will be “investing, supporting and scaling alongside great entrepreneurs,” according to its LinkedIn page.

Cercle’s platform combines unstructured medical data, such as medical records and test results, into a uniform format for fertility physicians and researchers, with the aim of assisting clinicians in developing more tailored treatment regimens and accelerating new pharmacological discoveries.

For example, if a patient wishes to freeze her eggs, her doctor can utilize Cercle’s platform to examine data from other patients who have also frozen their eggs. According to Cercle, the information is de-identified and anonymized, but the physician can see what kind of therapies helped or didn’t, and then utilize that knowledge to design a more tailored plan of action.

“That’s the founding mission behind Cercle, to personalize and contextualize biomedical and genomics information so women can make better, more informed health decisions,” Cercle CEO and co-founder Juan Carlos Riveiro said in a release Wednesday.

Currently, up to 80% of the world’s medical data is unstructured, making analysis and research challenging. Cercle employs artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to harmonize and turn this raw and fragmented data into accurate insights that assist in improving patient outcomes.

The CercleTM Biomedical Graph, which uses what the FDA calls Real World Data (RWD) and Real World Evidence (RWE), provides clinicians with insights to help provide more individualized and precise treatment plans and patient recommendations based on anonymized medical histories of a diverse base of patients from around the world.

In a statement, Cercle co-founder and CEO Juan Carlos Riveiro said: “We believe a healthy life is a right, not a privilege. Instead of continuing to collect cobwebs, the world’s medical data should be leveraged to generate groundbreaking data-driven insights at speed and scale. These insights can catalyze medical breakthroughs, and guide practitioners and patients to better healthcare decisions.”

Riveiro added, “That’s the founding mission behind Cercle, to personalize and contextualize biomedical and genomics information so women can make better, more informed health decisions. We are starting with the fertility market, and our long-term goal is to improve healthcare equity for women across the world radically.”

ercle is also working with the genetics companies Eurofins Genoma and US Fertility, the nation’s biggest fertility network with over 100 clinics. Cercle wants to initially focus on fertility treatment before expanding into other areas of women’s health.