LymeAlert bets a $50 home kit can test your tick for Lyme in 30 minutes

Sells a $49.99 at-home kit that crushes a tick and tests it for Borrelia burgdorferi, the Lyme bacterium, with a strip result in about 30 minutes.

People who have just been bitten will pay $50 to know in 30 minutes whether the tick carried Lyme — enough to build a consumer diagnostics brand without FDA approval.

$70,000 non-dilutive from MIT programs (as of February 2025), then a pre-seed round; preorders underwrote first manufacturing

Erin Dawicki, a pediatric physician assistant of 15 years, kept taking calls from parents holding a tick and nowhere to turn. In MIT's Sandbox DHIVE entrepreneurship program she was placed on the Lyme track; with Sloan Fellow classmates Brenda Ong and Michelle Ewy she began building the first at-home tick test and took it through the MIT delta v accelerator.

The trio incorporated deliberately late, after hard conversations about timelines and expectations. Roughly $70,000 in non-dilutive funding from MIT's Sandbox, Trust Center, PKG Center and I-Corps built the prototype, and Poets&Quants named LymeAlert a 2024 Most Disruptive MBA Startup. Field pilots with Massachusetts veterinarians — pets get bitten more — tuned the assay while several thousand preorders covered manufacturing costs.

LymeAlert opened preorders at $49.99 with kits shipping from the end of August 2026, backed by retail pilots at three REI locations in the Boston area and New Hampshire plus independent pet stores. The test detects down to 400 units of bacteria — 1990s animal studies suggest about 1,000 are needed to cause infection — and a CDC-reported spring 2026 spike in tick-bite ER visits set the backdrop for launch.

The 72-hour doxycycline window is the market: a 30-minute answer fits where a multi-day lab result structurally cannot.

Testing the tick instead of the patient keeps the product over-the-counter — no FDA pathway, no clinical trial years.

A clinician-founder designed for the real workflow: the moment of anxiety right after a bite, when prophylaxis decisions actually get made.

Non-dilutive university funding and preorder-financed manufacturing reached the market without depending on a venture round.

Consumer diagnostics can route around the regulator by testing the vector, not the patient — and a founder who lived the workflow knew the 72-hour window was the whole market.

As of the end of August 2026, kits ship at $49.99 with several thousand preorders banked, REI and pet-retail pilots running in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and field data flowing from veterinary clinics. The roadmap includes multiplex test strips for other tick pathogens such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever and alpha-gal next summer, an app-based computer-vision tick scanner, and AI hotspot maps built from climate, humidity and migration data — the company's stated goal is to lead early detection of vector-borne disease for both human and animal markets.