Why Vekovia exists

A letter from the founder

I'm Bulgarian. Every child here grows up with a fact none of us finds remarkable: the bacterium in our yogurt, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, was first isolated in 1905 by a Bulgarian doctor, Stamen Grigorov, working in Geneva. A few years later the Nobel laureate Élie Metchnikoff pointed at that same bacterium to explain why Bulgarian villagers seemed to live so long. His explanation has not aged well. The idea underneath it has: that the bacteria in your gut shape your health. That idea grew into one of the largest fields in modern medicine.

I did not set out to start a supplement company. I started reading about Akkermansia muciniphila, a modern chapter of the same story, and then I couldn't stop reading. One gut bacterium, described in 2004, with twenty years of careful work behind it. A human trial in Nature Medicine in 2019. The mechanism traced in Nature Microbiology. Reviews in the best journals the field has. An EU Novel Food authorisation in 2022. And almost nobody outside research had heard of it.

Then I looked at how a thing like this usually gets sold. The supplement industry has a habit of taking a thread of real science and pulling on it until it becomes a promise nobody can keep. Miracle language. Before-and-afters. Reviews that read like fiction. In a category that lives or dies on whether it can be believed, that seemed like a strange way to behave, and it was everything I didn't want to build.

So Vekovia began as a reaction as much as a product. What would it look like to sell this honestly?

What we decided

Three rules. We hold ourselves to them.

Everything we say traces to a study you can open. Our science hub lists the actual papers, with links to PubMed and the DOI. If we can't cite it, we don't say it.
We pair the bacterium with the food the research points to. Pasteurised Akkermansia muciniphila, the EU-authorised and human-studied form, with freeze-dried European berries whose polyphenols the literature links to it. We don't add an ingredient because it looks good on a label.
We never overclaim. Vekovia is a food supplement. It does not treat, prevent, or cure anything, and we will never say it does. When the science is early, we say early.

How we make it

The bacterium comes directly from a Belgian research lab, the fruit from European growers. Everything is freeze-dried, using the preservation method developed for long-duration space missions, so a capsule keeps on a shelf without preservatives.

The promise

We would rather grow slowly with people who trust us than quickly with people we've misled. No fake reviews, no invented testimonials, no "natural alternative to a drug." What you get is the bacterium, the berries, the science, and the references to check us on.

If that's the kind of company you want to buy from, you're in the right place.

We called it Vekovia, from the Bulgarian векове — centuries. For the century of science behind this idea, and the Bulgarian roots it grew from.

— Atanas, Founder