Culina Health for Clinical Nutrition
We are excited to announce our investment in Culina Health’s seed round. Based in New York City, Culina Health is a clinical telenutrition platform focused on treating, reversing, and preventing chronic conditions using medical nutrition therapy from registered dietitians (RDs). It provides data-powered personalized nutritional programs, enabled by a patient-facing app, for patients, allows for seamless electronic health record data transfer and feedback for physicians, and provides back-office and administrative help for RDs.
Clinical nutrition centers on the prevention, diagnosis, and management of nutritional changes in patients linked to chronic diseases and conditions. While the wellness nutrition space already sees an abundance of technological solutions such as nutrition apps, clinical nutrition is still highly reliant on an individual RD-based approach with limited technological solutions available and no market leaders, despite the market growth. Clinical nutrition support will provide value for a large population with chronic disease (diabetes, celiac disease, cardiovascular disease, etc.) and other nutrition support needs. There is a huge opportunity in bringing an effective solution to this space.
Culina has developed “The Culina” way of care, where it provides extensive training and education to the RD staff to ensure standardized and quality care. In addition, care delivery data models are developed from data captured from the platform and smartphone, further facilitated by AI-enabled features such as photo interpolation of food to-be-consumed.
We are excited for the founding team to revolutionize the clinical nutrition space. Vanessa Rissetto, RD, co-founder and co-CEO, has 10+ years of experience as an RD and was a dietary director at NYU. She is a highly sought-after dietitian with frequent appearances in the press and media. Steve Kuyan, co-founder and co-CEO, has 10+ years of experience in startup, venture capital, investing, and startup growth. He founded and led NYU Future Labs with 40 exits. Tamar Samuels, RD, co-founder, has 7+ years of experience in hospital and private RD practice. Given the management team’s expertise and recognition in the clinical nutrition space and their experience in start-up operations and growth, Culina Health is uniquely positioned to attract top RD talents and provide quality care to patients.
We believe in the founding team’s vision, and we are excited to partner with them to achieve their mission: democratizing access to clinical nutrition to increase everyone’s healthy life span through personalized data-driven telenutrition!