The 80-Year Design Failure No One Questioned

The speculum was invented in the 1840s. Since then, its basic function in cervical cancer screening has not meaningfully changed. The most significant update over more than a century of use was switching from metal to plastic. No one—not device manufacturers, not health systems, not payers—went back to the beginning and asked whether the underlying experience could be redesigned from scratch.

Egan did. In 2020, she co-founded Teal Health with Dr. Avnesh Thakor, an interventional radiologist and Stanford professor who had built an early self-collection prototype. The two were introduced by a mutual friend who knew Egan's background: a career at the intersection of health tech investing (.406 Ventures, Emergence Capital) and operating roles at Zendesk and Stitch Labs, as well as a long-standing conviction that women's healthcare deserved better.

The Teal Wand is a soft-sponge vaginal self-collection device roughly the profile of a tampon. A patient inserts it, rotates it ten times, and mails the sample to a lab, where it is processed on the same Roche cobas HPV test used in clinical settings. Accuracy matches clinician-collected samples 95% of the time.

The design process extended far beyond the device itself. Teal partnered with IDEO, then spent four additional years in iterative development—questioning the packaging, the telehealth visit, the language in every patient touchpoint. The north star was never clinical efficiency. It was whether a woman felt valued.

The market's response exposed how deep the design failure ran. "Almost half of all the women that come to us have been behind on their screening," Egan notes. "Almost 20% of them had never been screened before, but were well within screening age." These were not disengaged patients. They were women the existing system had never given a workable option. "Women want to be healthy." she emphasizes. "We just need options that work for us."

The clinical trial that supported FDA authorization reflected the same philosophy. Rather than standard text-heavy recruitment, Teal designed materials to make women feel like partners in something meaningful. Enrollment reached approximately 80% across trial sites, against an industry norm closer to 10 to 20%. Ninety-four percent of participants said they preferred self-collection over in-office screening.

How Teal Built Toward A Coverage Mandate

The product story is about design. The business story is about foresight.

Egan pursued FDA authorization from day one—a harder, slower pathway than alternatives—because she understood that full insurance coverage, not early-adopter revenue, was the real destination. "Women shouldn't have to pay out of pocket to get what is like a grade-A preventive screening," she stresses. That conviction shaped every strategic decision Teal made.

Egan participated in the Biden Cancer Moonshot cervical cancer roundtable, helping build the conditions under which self-collection screening would eventually be recognized in national guidelines. In late 2025, the American Cancer Society updated its cervical cancer screening guidelines to explicitly include at-home self-collection.

Then the Health Resources and Services Administration added Teal to its women's preventive services guidelines—a Grade A designation with a binding consequence. By January 2027, at-home cervical cancer screening must be fully covered under the Affordable Care Act, with no cost-sharing for patients. Payers were already calling before the FDA authorization came through.

Nicole Johnson, partner at Forerunner Ventures, one of Teal's lead investors, describes what Egan built as a template. "Teal Health has shown that solving a neglected but critically important problem in women's health can rapidly align clinical guidelines, payer coverage, and industry stakeholders, unlocking both growth and meaningful impact," Johnson observes.

Teal has raised $23 million to date, including a January 2025 seed extension led by Emerson Collective and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Serena Ventures, Metrodora, and a strategic investment from Labcorp.

When The Algorithm Flags A Cancer Screening

One obstacle Egan did not fully anticipate came from digital infrastructure. Despite FDA authorization, Teal has had to be careful about clinical language in its marketing. The medically accurate descriptor for its product—vaginal self-collection—can trigger algorithmic suppression on ad platforms and search systems. "Vaginal collection might be more of a trigger on censorship," Egan acknowledges.

The implications go beyond one company's marketing budget. Algorithmic suppression of women's health content has been documented across major ad platforms, social media channels, and search infrastructure—a pattern that disadvantages not just women’s health startups but the women trying to find accurate health information online.

When a federally authorized cancer screening tool must soften its own clinical language to avoid being filtered out, the same design failure that produced an 80-year-old unreformed procedure has simply migrated to a new medium.

A Diagnostics Giant Just Entered The Category

On April 8, 2026, Waters Corporation announced FDA clearance of the Onclarity HPV Self-Collection Kit—Teal's first direct competitor in the at-home cervical cancer screening market. Waters, which acquired BD's biosciences and diagnostics division for $17.5 billion last July, brings institutional scale, existing lab infrastructure, and immediate coverage by private insurance, Medicaid, and Medicare.

Teal's first-mover window has narrowed. But a diagnostics giant can replicate a collection device. It cannot easily replicate the relationship Teal built with the women it reached first—including the nearly 20% who had never been screened at all before the Teal Wand existed. "With a strong regulatory foundation and accelerating demand," Johnson points out, the company "is well positioned to lead the next generation of at-home, telehealth-enabled care."

Designing For Women Changes Everything

Teal Health went live in all 50 states in January 2026.TIME named the Teal Wand one of its Best Inventions of 2025, and Egan was named to TIME100 Health in February 2026. For Egan, none of it is the finish line. "When I think about success," she explains, "it's that every woman is screened…we've eradicated cervical cancer."

The cervical cancer screening gap was never a patient behavior problem. It was a design problem—built into an 80-year-old procedure, reinforced by a healthcare system that never asked whether women wanted something different, and now extended into the digital platforms women rely on to find care. Teal's evidence that asking the question produces a different answer is now part of the public record. The next question is whether the rest of healthcare is paying attention.