Yesterday Nutrino, the Israeli personalized nutrition company, announced the completion of its $8 million Series A funding round. Nielsen Ventures, Pereg Ventures, and Gandyr Group joined existing investors, including the New York Angels group, who led the company’s seed round. This latest raise brings their total capital to $10 million.
Founded in 2011, Nutrino synthesizes information from scientific reports, menus, and food nutrition breakdowns and matches that to data points on your health and eating habits, which it gets from wearables, health apps, or information you input directly into their Nutrino app. It feeds all this information into FoodPrint, their analytics platform, which then uses machine learning and AI to create an individualized nutrition profile and personalized dietary recommendations.
Nutrino isn’t the only company out there offering personalized nutrition. Just a few weeks ago we wrote about Sage Project, a platform which breaks down nutritional information for a variety of products and will soon offer individualized dietary recommendations. Habit uses personalized nutrition information to create customized meal kits. And last year, Amazon partnered with EatLove to offer meal planning and recipes tailored to personal health profiles.
Photo: Nutrino blog.
Two things seem to set Nutrino apart. First is its specialization in curating dynamic nutrition profiles for people with diabetes. In 2016 Nutrino launched a partnership with Medtronic, a producer of continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps, to help people with diabetes better customize their diets. Users could sync their monitors and pumps to the Nutrino app, which would use data from the person’s glucose and carbohydrate levels to offer food suggestions. They can also use the app to scan grocery barcodes and get a nutritional breakdown of each item, or, if they’re in one of the 200,000 restaurants that fits with Nutrino’s technology, get personalized menu recommendations based on their glucose and carbohydrate levels.
Which, if you’re someone suffering from diabetes, is critical. There are an estimated 415 million people around the world living with diabetes, and the number is expected to grow to 642 million by 2040. Managing diets is a key part of staying healthy with the disease, and Nutrino’s responsive app seems like a helpful tool.
The second thing that sets Nutrino apart from other personalized nutrition platforms is its food database, which collates information on the eating habits of its millions of users. Companies in food & beverage and fitness use this data to shape their products and marketing strategies. So Nutrino doesn’t only serve individuals; it also uses their data to market its services to companies who want more data on nutrition and consumer eating habits (though promises to protect user confidentiality).
Nutrino will use its funding to expand its database, grow its personalized nutrition services, and explore new partnerships in food analytics for diabetics.
Personalized nutrition and meal recommendations are getting a lot of buzz right now. And Nutrino’s recent funding raise seems to indicate that these trends aren’t going to slow down anytime soon.
