A blood draw, a quiet algorithm, and a warning that arrives early.
Somewhere between weeks 17 and 22 of pregnancy, a phlebotomist fills a small tube. Within days, a Mirvie machine has read tens of thousands of RNA messages from mother, placenta and baby. The patient gets a risk score for preeclampsia - the kind of warning that, for most of medical history, has arrived months too late.
Pregnancy medicine has, for a long time, been the field everyone agrees is critical and almost no one has rebuilt. Roughly one in five pregnancies hits a complication. Preeclampsia alone kills more than 70,000 mothers and 500,000 babies worldwide each year. The standard risk model - "do you have a history of high blood pressure? are you over 35?" - belongs to a century that's gone.
Mirvie was started in 2018 by Maneesh Jain, a physicist-turned-entrepreneur, and Stephen Quake, the Stanford bioengineer whose work made non-invasive prenatal testing possible in the first place. Quake's interest in the field is older than the company. Years before Mirvie existed, his wife was offered an amniocentesis - the long-needle test - and he wondered if you could read fetal information directly from her blood. That question became cell-free DNA. It became NIPT. It also became the unfinished business that Mirvie now exists to take further.
The bet is straightforward to state and difficult to execute: the placenta is constantly broadcasting. It sheds cell-free RNA - tiny molecular dispatches - into the mother's bloodstream. If you can collect those messages and read enough of them, you can hear when something is going wrong long before the body shows symptoms. Mirvie's platform processes about 22,000 RNA transcripts per patient. Multiply that by a foundational study of nearly 11,000 representative US pregnancies and you get something like 200 million data points - the largest cell-free RNA dataset in obstetrics, and the training corpus for the company's machine learning models.
The first product to come out of that work is Encompass, launched commercially in 2025. It is a blood test, paired with a preventive action plan and a virtual support tool. In landmark research, Encompass identified 9 out of 10 patients who later developed preterm preeclampsia as high risk. The US Food and Drug Administration granted the underlying device Breakthrough designation. TIME put it on the Best Inventions of 2025 list. The company became the first RNA-based pregnancy-health firm to earn CLIA certification - the badge that says a clinical lab is allowed to report results that doctors can act on.