Key Takeaways:
More than 9 million women in the United States are diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection (STI) each year. Many have no noticeable symptoms and, if left untreated, can lead to chronic pelvic pain, infertility, or even life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.
The molecular diagnostics market for STIs is projected to grow from $3.67 billion in 2025 to $6.05 billion in 2030, driven in part by a seismic shift in how and where people expect to get tested. At the same time, the at-home STI testing market, valued at $2.98 billion in 2025, is projected to reach $5.86 billion by 2033, with North America accounting for 40.27% of revenue. The shift towards convenience, which accelerated dramatically during COVID, shows no signs of reversing.
Yet, according to Adam de la Zerda, founder and CEO of Visby Medical, 40 million STI tests are processed in the United States each year. And in half of those cases, the result never reaches the patient. Not because the technology failed, but because the system did. Healthcare providers cannot leave informative voicemails, patients miss unknown calls, and the back-and-forth collapses, leaving many who test positive without the treatment they need.
"The healthcare system is just not set up to think about us as consumers," de la Zerda told BeautyMatter. "It's set up to think of us as patients. Which is similar, but not quite [the same]."
The distinction matters. Patients wait. Consumers expect answers. And in a category where untreated infections are causing 24,000 women in the US to lose their fertility every year, the gap between those two framings is not semantic. It is a public health failure with a body count.
De la Zerda built Visby Medical as an alternative option.
From Clinic Device to Palm-Sized Unicorn
The San Jose–based company has developed the world's first FDA-authorized OTC polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for women's sexual health, sold for $149.99, and delivering results for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis in 30 minutes, at home, with a telehealth consultation included. It is a product that did not exist two years ago. It is also, according to de la Zerda, long overdue.
"Thousands of women lose their fertility every year just from those three infections. And the reason why it's particularly sad: These are totally curable infections with a simple course of an antibiotic that costs four or five dollars,” de la Zerda said.
But the burden falls hardest on the youngest. People aged 15–24—a cohort that is both the most affected and the least likely to navigate a clinical system built around friction, waiting, and callbacks—account for roughly half of all new STIs annually and 62% of chlamydia cases.
It is a gap that Visby has been working to close since its earliest days as a clinical diagnostics company. It spent years developing single-use, palm-sized PCR devices for point-of-care settings: the kind of lab-quality diagnostic technology that previously required machines the size of a refrigerator operated by trained technicians. Shrinking that down to a device a clinician could run bedside was the first breakthrough. Putting it in the hands of consumers was the second.
That decision—to pause clinical point-of-care sales entirely and dedicate all resources to being the first mover in OTC molecular diagnostics—was a deliberate and unusual strategic concentration. The category it chose to prioritize was equally so: women's sexual health, an area the US healthcare system has historically underserved.
While most competitors still rely on mail-back kits or antigen tests, Visby went straight for PCR accuracy in the home, putting its women’s STI test at the center of the roadmap.
Its funding reflects that conviction. Visby has raised $525 million to date across multiple rounds, including a most recent $55 million Series F, giving it the capital to scale from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of monthly tests. Valued at over $1 billion, the company’s trajectory signals where the market believes this category is headed.
Distribution, Differentiation, and a New Diagnostic Journey
De la Zerda had assumed privacy would be the product's primary draw. He was wrong.
"By far the number one reason is the speed of getting the result," he told BeautyMatter. In a category where the standard experience involves sending a sample to a lab, waiting days, and hoping someone calls back, 30 minutes is not a feature. It is a category shift.
Visby collapses the entire diagnostic journey. The user self-swabs, inserts the sample into the palm-sized device, closes the lid, and receives lab-accurate results via app in 30 minutes. If the result is positive, it goes simultaneously to an Optum Now clinician—at no additional cost—who reviews the chart, sends a prescription to the patient's chosen pharmacy, and closes the loop. The whole process, from suspicion to treatment in hand, can now happen before lunch.
"It's not about circumventing the doctor," de la Zerda said. "It's about ordering the sequence the right way. Let's first get you tested, and if you're positive, then we'll get you a doctor and give you a prescription. That's what you actually need from the doctor."
Distribution is scaling to match. The test is available via DoorDash and GoPuff for same-day delivery in major cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, with month-on-month growth ranging from 50% to 150%. In April 2026, DoorDash coverage will likely reach nearly 2,000 zip codes, putting the test within reach of roughly 15%–20% of US middle- to high-income households. The delivery app’s users are twice as likely to purchase the tests compared to other channels.
The test also sits alongside emergency contraception on DoorDash—a pairing that says everything about how consumers are already thinking about sexual health as self-care.
Beyond on-demand delivery, Quest and Labcorp (the two dominant forces in US diagnostics) have both independently partnered with Visby to carry out the test on their consumer platforms. Ovia Health, a leading women's health app, will also offer the test to its employer and health plan partners in January 2026. Everlywell, whose founder, Julia Cheek, was an early commercial validator of the $149.99 price point, also carries the test, despite it directly competing with Everlywell's own mail-back offerings.
The product has a 4.7-star rating (out of 5) on Apple’s App Store and a net promoter score above 70, a widely used customer satisfaction metric, indicating higher levels of both customer satisfaction and loyalty. Among a category still fighting stigma, those numbers are striking. "Almost none of them go on their Facebook page to say, ‘I just bought an STD test,’" de la Zerda acknowledged. Word of mouth is structurally limited. Awareness is being built through paid media on Google, Instagram, and TikTok, as well as through partnerships that put the test where trust already exists.
The platform itself is built on Google Cloud, with Vertex AI and Gemini being integrated over the coming year to deliver personalized sexual health education, proactive testing reminders, and follow-up nudges. The vision is less a one-time diagnostic tool and more an ongoing health relationship.
That shift from transaction to continuity marks the beginning of Visby's next chapter.
A Very Visby Future
The women's sexual health test is the starting point, not the destination. Sexual health tests for men are in the pipeline, alongside a sore throat panel detecting strep and common respiratory viruses, and a UTI test with antibiotic resistance detection to guide appropriate treatment. Each addition follows the same logic: find the diagnostic moment where the current system fails the patient, then fix it.
Insurance coverage is also on the horizon. De la Zerda expects insurers to begin recognizing the test as a medical benefit within the next 12 months, reasoning that a $149.99 at-home test is considerably cheaper for a payer than an urgent care or emergency room visit. When that happens, the out-of-pocket cost drops to a copay. The addressable market expands significantly.
Sorority partnerships are in development to reach the 18–24 cohort, where STI rates are highest. A partnership with an organization supporting rape survivors is also underway, giving women the option to test privately at home weeks after an assault, rather than returning to a clinic to relive the experience.
The global STD self-testing market was valued at $1.21 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a 7.43% CAGR through 2030, while global consultancy firm Simon-Kucher projects that the majority of diagnostic tests in the US and EU will shift toward home use by 2035. According to de la Zerda, international expansion is planned for 2027.
"I hope that pretty soon we'll be able to make this a less stigmatized, less taboo thing,” de la Zerda added, so that it becomes just another form of “taking care of oneself.”
That reframe, from shameful to self-care, from patient to consumer, from waiting room to doorstep, is Visby’s entire thesis. The technology exists. But the hardest part? Changing the culture around it.