Company leader
Cheryl Sew Hoy
Founder and CEO
Tiny Health
Cheryl Sew Hoy is the founder and chief executive of Tiny Health, which sells at-home microbiome tests for babies, children, and adults. A mother of three and a Cornell-trained engineer, she started the company after her daughter's eczema and food sensitivities led her into research on the infant gut.
Engineering at Cornell
Sew Hoy earned a bachelor's degree in operations research and industrial engineering and a master's degree in engineering management and data mining from Cornell University, both on full scholarships, she told Pulse 2.0.
Building Startups in the U.S. and Southeast Asia
She founded Reclip.It, a digital coupon company that Walmart Labs acquired, and then led brand and growth at the coding school Hack Reactor and at Flexiroam. She also served as chief executive of MaGIC, a $30 million government-backed initiative to grow Southeast Asia's startup ecosystem.
A Daughter's Eczema and a Garage Start
Her daughter, born by C-section, developed eczema, allergies, and food sensitivities, while her son, born vaginally, did not, and the contrast sent her into the research on the infant gut, she told Crunchbase News. “I was reading all this literature and asked my doctors about it, and none of my doctors knew what I was talking about,” she said. She incorporated Tiny Health in Austin a week after her son's birth in 2020, put $50,000 of her own money into a first study, and launched the baby test in 2022. In her letter on the Series B, she wrote that early kits were hand-packed by her mother out of her garage.