Nourish, a nutrition counseling company, announced Wednesday that it raised $70 million in Series B funding for its network of registered dietitians.
New York City-based Nourish, which launched three years ago, has more than 3,000 registered dietitians on its platform, all W-2 employees. It connects patients with a chronic condition with a dietitian, and they have regular virtual appointments. In between sessions, patients can message their dietitian, as well as access recipes and educational content on the app. Nourish also leverages AI to help dietitians with administrative tasks like note-taking, and to support patients with meal tracking and recipe recommendations.
About 94% of patients are able to access these services without out-of-pocket costs, according to the announcement. The company works with commercial plans, Medicare and Medicaid across all 50 states.
The Series B round was led by J.P. Morgan Private Capital’s Growth Equity Partners, and included participation from Thrive Capital, Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Maverick Ventures, BoxGroup, Atomico, G Squared and Pinegrove. In total, Nourish has raised $115 million.
“Nourish is addressing one of our country’s most urgent challenges with a compelling outcomes-driven and AI-native approach,” said Paris Heymann, co-managing partner of J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, in a statement.
The financing will help the company grow its dietitian network, deepen partnerships with healthcare organizations, scale its AI technology and invest in its team, according to Aidan Dewar, co-founder and CEO of Nourish. In addition, Nourish will build out “more clinical protocols for conditions where nutrition is especially critical, like cardiometabolic disease,” he said.
Nourish was created because the founders — three friends — benefited from working with registered dietitians to manage their own chronic conditions. Currently 60% of people in the U.S. battle at least one chronic condition, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Despite a large need, less than 1% of eligible Americans receive support from registered dietitians, Dewar stated. This is what Nourish hopes to change.
“Our healthcare system is at an inflection point, with chronic disease rates and costs rising to unsustainable levels. Payers are under growing pressure to find scalable solutions that actually work. … We built Nourish to make healthcare radically better for millions of Americans — it’s the care we wanted ourselves during our own patient journeys,” Dewar said. ‘We wanted to build a patient-friendly healthcare system with lifestyle change and nutrition as a first-line treatment, not an afterthought.”
More and more, people in the healthcare industry are recognizing the importance of nutrition in managing chronic conditions. Several other startups also offer access to a network of registered dietitians, including Fay and Culina Health. Payers and integrated healthcare systems are also launching food as medicine initiatives, including Elevance Health, Highmark Health and Kaiser Permanente.
Photo: fcafotodigital, Getty Images
