Why Vekovia exists

A letter from the founder

I'm Bulgarian, and I grew up with a fact most Bulgarians barely think about: our country gave the world Lactobacillus bulgaricus — the bacterium in our yogurt that, in 1905, a Bulgarian doctor named Stamen Grigorov was the first to isolate. A few years later the Nobel laureate Élie Metchnikoff pointed to that same bacterium to explain why Bulgarian villagers seemed to live so long. Whatever you make of his hypothesis, the idea it launched — that the bacteria in your gut shape your health — became one of the largest fields in modern medicine.

I didn't set out to start a supplement company. I started reading about Akkermansia muciniphila — a modern chapter in that same story — and I couldn't stop. Here was a single gut bacterium with two decades of serious science behind it — a 2019 human trial in Nature Medicine, mechanistic work in Nature Microbiology, reviews in the most respected journals in the field — and almost nobody outside research had heard of it. The more papers I opened, the stranger that gap felt: real, careful science on one side, near-silence on the other.

What I found when I looked at how this kind of thing gets sold bothered me. The supplement industry has a habit of taking a thread of real science and stretching it into a promise it can't keep. Miracle language. Before-and-afters. Reviews that read like fiction. For a category that should live or die on credibility, it was everything I didn't want to build.

So Vekovia started as a reaction as much as a product: what would it look like to sell this honestly?

What we decided

Three rules, and we hold ourselves to them:

1. 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.
2. We pair the bacterium with the food the research points to. Pasteurised Akkermansia muciniphila — the EU-authorised, human-studied form — with freeze-dried European berries whose polyphenols are linked to it in the literature. We don't add ingredients because they sound good on a label.
3. 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

We source the bacterium directly from a Belgian research lab and the berries from European growers. Everything is freeze-dried — the same preservation method developed for long-duration space missions — so the capsules stay stable 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." Just 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