Health AI startup Cercle debuts with backing from Sheryl Sandberg

A new health tech startup called Cercle launched Wednesday and announced major global partners and investors, including Meta's former COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Cercle uses artificial intelligence to try and advance women's health, particularly within fertility care. The company's platform organizes unstructured medical data, such as medical records and test results, into a standardized format for fertility doctors and researchers, in the hopes it will help clinicians develop more personalized treatment plans and accelerate new discoveries in pharmaceuticals.

For instance, if a patient wants to freeze her eggs, her doctor can use Cercle's platform to look at data from similar patients who have also had their eggs frozen. The information is de-identified and anonymous, according to Cercle, but the physician can see what kind of treatments helped or didn't, then use that information to develop a more personalized 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.

Cercle's lead investors include Sandberg and her husband Tom Bernthal through their new venture fund, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, Cercle announced. Sandberg left her role as COO of Meta in June of 2022, and her fund will be "investing, supporting and scaling alongside great entrepreneurs," according to its LinkedIn page.

Cercle is also partnering with the genetics company Eurofins Genoma, as well as US Fertility, the nation's largest fertility network that supports more than 100 clinics.

Cercle said it will initially focus on fertility care but plans to expand to other areas within women's health.