Culina Health, a telenutrition company, raised $7.9 million in a series A funding round led by Healthworx, the innovation and investment arm of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the company announced on Thursday.
Founded in 2020, Culina Health provides one-on-one nutrition therapy for patients with a range of conditions like obesity and diabetes. Rethink Impact, Collab Capital, Collide Capital, Vamos Ventures, Tensility Venture Partners, Cake Ventures and GW Ventures also participated in the round.
Co-founder of Culina Health Vanessa Rissetto was inspired to increase access to nutrition counseling covered by insurance when she read a 2014 New York Times article that detailed the tens of thousands of dollars one dietician was charging for a package of nutrition counseling sessions. Rissetto worked as a registered dietician at Mt. Sinai Hospital at the time, and her services were covered by most major insurance companies.
Rissetto later joined forces with Tamar Samuels, registered dietician and the other Culina Health co-founder, to provide tele-nutrition services covered by insurance and promote the role of dietetics in healthcare.
Together, Rissetto and Samuels want to normalize consistent dietetic care.
“You go to the dentist twice a year. You go to the PCP once a year. Everybody knows you get a mammogram,” Rissetto said. “These are these things that are ingrained in us as a society, for wellness, to be well, and so just like saying ‘Yes, and also go see your dietitian.’ Your dietitian is going to coordinate care with the physician. You're going to get better outcomes. Less acute patients are going to stay out of the physician office, which then means you, if you are sick and get an appointment with the physician, it's good for health care at large. So normalizing that and educating people around that is really the goal.”
Rissetto said most Americans don’t know their insurance will cover between 12 and 26 sessions of nutrition therapy. In fact, Culina says that 70% of insured Americans have access to their services, and the only cost to them is the co-pay.
Rissetto and Samuels also want to bust the myth that nutrition counseling is only for weight loss.
“Fifty percent of our patients come in for weight loss, but the other 50% are wanting to lower their A1c or lower their LDL (low-density lipoprotein cholesterol), which is the biggest predictor of stroke or heart attack,” Rissetto said. "They want to have a better relationship with food. They want to know how to talk to their kids about food. So it runs the gamut.”
However, with the rise of GLP-1s and growing popularity of food as medicine, Culina stands to benefit by providing patients with care that can stabilize the benefits of weight loss drugs and help patients make lifestyle changes to stay at a healthy weight.
Culina is also committed to collecting outcomes data to prove that a better diet is linked to lower total cost of care. So far, Culina has saved payers $7,000 per patient per year.
With the series A funding, Rissetto said the company will build out technological efficiencies so that clinicians can spend more time with patients and less time doing administrative work. It also seeks to hire additional employees.
“New interventions that engage members, improve health outcomes, and ultimately reduce long-term costs associated with managing chronic conditions are core to the potential of whole-person health,” Doba Parushev, managing partner at Healthworx, said in a statement. “Through its clinically driven approach to nutrition and unparalleled level of support, compassion, and attention from its care team, Culina Health has created a viable solution that can be deployed at scale, and has the potential to improve the health of millions of people.”