Chances are, someone in your life is also managing a chronic health condition. Maybe it’s a parent who has diabetes, a friend who is overcoming obesity, or a partner who is overcoming cardiovascular disease. The advice they receive from their doctors is almost always the same: eat better, live healthier. What they don’t know is that there are clinicians specifically trained to help with just that, and that their insurance likely covers it.
This disconnect is at the heart of America’s most underappreciated health care crisis. Six out of 10 American adults have at least one chronic cardiometabolic disease. Diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease collectively cause more than $1 trillion in health care costs annually. However, the most effective, evidence-backed interventions for most of these conditions are not new drugs or surgical procedures. A conversation with a registered dietitian.
Although nutrition counseling has been covered by insurance for more than a decade, fewer than 1% of Americans who could benefit from it actually receive it. The reason was structural. Supply was fragmented across thousands of small private practices, billing was opaque, and most patients didn’t even know their benefits existed. One of the most powerful preventive tools in the medical field has sat largely unused for many years.
The advent of GLP-1 formulations has created a vast new patient population with a real clinical need for nutritional support. Because medication alone is not enough to achieve lasting effects, payers are starting to connect the dots, with major insurance companies moving to require the involvement of dietitians as a condition of GLP-1 approval. On top of that is a widespread shift from reactive treatments to upstream preventive cardiometabolic management. Menlo has experienced the following structural changes: Today’s nutrition market is much like the behavioral health market a few years ago when growth therapy was born out of the surge in demand due to COVID-19. Equally important are the possibilities it creates for scalable new infrastructure.
Building an unprecedented nutritional care infrastructure
Co-founders Aidan, Stephanie, and Sam built Nourish based on real-world experience, not just whiteboards. Each had not only faced health issues that dietitian-led care ultimately helped resolve, but also experienced first-hand that access to care was unnecessarily difficult. Three friends and former classmates set out to build the experience they wanted. And from the moment we met, their control of issues, attention to detail, and relentless focus on execution made it clear that they were a problem-solving team. Today, we couldn’t be more excited to announce that Menlo Ventures is leading Nourish’s $100 million Series C.
Nuturish has built a platform that makes nutritional care truly accessible. We connect patients and dietitians for insurance-covered virtual sessions and handle credentialing, insurance verification, billing, scheduling, and clinical documentation, so dietitians can spend their time on care instead of paperwork. For patients, that means finding and making an appointment with a compatible provider in minutes with little or no out-of-pocket costs.
Today, Nourish has a network of more than 10,000 registered dietitians in all 50 states, serving hundreds of thousands of patients. What drives the remarkable advocacy work on both sides is how deeply AI is embedded in the experience. Session notes are automatically created, clinical insights automatically surface from patient data, and pre-approval workflows run in the background. The result is a platform that gets smarter with each session and a care experience that feels vastly different than anything that came before.
What makes this especially powerful is that Nourish has also solved the problem of patient acquisition. Over the past two years, the team has been building a pharmaceutical company-style field sales motion. There, dedicated personnel were able to develop relationships with physicians and turn them into regular sources of referrals. Actively referred by tens of thousands of providers, Nourish has become a clinical-grade platform and is increasingly standardized in the industry.
And this is just the beginning. By expanding into GLP-1 prescribing, testing, and chronic care management, Nourish is evolving from a nutrition platform to a true long-term care partner built around the whole patient, rather than a single touchpoint in their health journey.
Supporting the healthcare trinity: building the future of care delivery
This investment furthers the theory we have long built around personalized, accessible, and insured care, focusing on what we believe to be the Trinity of Health Care: improved access, better outcomes, and lower costs. Grow Therapy provides immediate and reimbursable access to behavioral therapy. Function Health provides comprehensive diagnostics to the general public. Solace provides an advocate to guide patients through one of life’s most confusing systems. Cartwheel provides mental health care for children and teens where they already are. And Ophelia makes evidence-based addiction treatment available to everyone.
Nourish is the next chapter in that story, extending the same logic to cardiometabolic health. We believe this category is at a real tipping point, and Nourish is perfectly positioned to define what this area of care can look like over the next decade and beyond. We couldn’t be more proud to partner with Aidan, Stephanie, Sam and the rest of the team as they embark on this journey.
If you are a patient looking for a nutritionist or a healthcare provider interested in joining our network, please click here. nutrition.com.
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