Research on the human microbiome — microorganism communities that live in a part of your body such as your mouth or gut — has led to a number of insights and spurred further investigations into what makes up a healthy person. Combined with the continuing interest in alternative medicine, that is leading to some venture dollars getting channeled into at least one prominent startup in the space. Viome — which has built a business out of assessing customers’ microbiomes, applying AI to the data and using that to provide them with supplements and other guidance based on the findings — has raised $86.5 million to expand its business.

The funding, a Series C, is being co-led by Khosla Ventures and Bold Capital, with other unnamed current and new investors also participating. The company claims that its RNA sequencing technology, which was originally developed out of research from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, “is clinically validated, fully automated, exclusively licensed by Viome [to analyze] biological samples at least 1,000 times greater than other technologies.”The company, based out of Bellevue, Washington, and founded in 2016, says that it has run tests for some 350,000 consumers from 106 countries (primarily the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia) to date, working out to some 600,000 samples that are feeding and informing its algorithm.

Its plan is to use the equity funding both to expand existing business — which includes tests based on samples of a person’s blood, stools and saliva, vitamin supplements and assessments around diet — as well as to break into new areas. That will include new product lines around mouth and dental health, and retail partnerships, including a deal with CVS that will see the pharmacy chain offer Viome tests in some 200 stores in the U.S.

The CVS deal — in which CVS is buying kits in a wider revenue share agreement — will not include CVS investing in Viome, CEO and founder Naveen Jain (the entrepreneur who founded Infospace in the first wave of dot-com startups, helped judge the XPrize and more) said in an interview.

“They believe that more and more people are becoming gut-health conscious and they want to sell the product in their store,” to address that, he added, downing some of what he told me were his own custom-designed capsules (a mix of pre- and probiotics and vitamins) while talking to me.Viome is not disclosing its valuation, but to date it has raised $175 million and was last valued in 2022 (when it disclosed a new $67 million in funding) at $339 million, according to PitchBook data. That valuation “has not gone down,” Jain said, but he would not give an updated number. Investors in the company have included Marc Benioff, a healthcare investor called Better Health Group and SquareOne Capital, among others.

Viome’s raise and plans to grow come amid a critical moment for companies like it, playing in the crossover of healthcare, technology, biotech and changing consumer sentiments.

In countries like the U.S., as standard medical services continue to get more expensive covering an ever-wider set of conditions, we’re seeing a growing population of consumers swing toward what they see as complementary, or even replacements, for pursuing the former route.