- DayTwo — a food-as-medicine solution company that helps people with diet-related chronic illnesses to balance blood glucose — recently raised $31 million
DayTwo is a food-as-medicine solution that helps people with diet-related chronic illnesses to balance their blood glucose including type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. And by unlocking the intelligence found in the microbiome, DayTwo addresses how people process the same food differently and can significantly improve predictive and individualized glycemic response. Recently, DayTwo announced it raised $31 million in Series B funding.
With this round of funding, DayTwo is going to accelerate go-to-market initiatives in the U.S. where the company partners with payers, providers, and employers, and to continue to develop a new generation of products and services for metabolic and gastrointestinal conditions.
This round of funding was co-led by aMoon (a leading life sciences venture fund) and Ofek Ventures (a new venture fund focused on ICT technologies). Existing investors Seventure Partners and Johnson & Johnson also continued their participation in the round. And previous funding rounds included contributions from the Mayo Clinic for the company’s validation trial recently published in JAMA. Including this round of funding, DayTwo has raised a total of $48 million.
“DayTwo is the only evidence-based, actionable, microbiome platform in the market today. We are in a privileged position to leverage our experience including first-rate science, clinical trials in Israel and the United States, tens of thousands of customers, and provider, employer, and payer relationships,” said DayTwo CEO and founder Lihi Segal. “This deep and broad foundation, coupled with this financing, enables DayTwo to address the large and pressing clinical need to bring food-as-medicine to market for people with type 2 diabetes in the United States.”
The DayTwo glycemic control solution uses gut profiling and other clinical parameters to provide a food-as-medicine solution to enable glycemic control. And DayTwo’s personalized approach provides actionable insights into how the body metabolizes food and allows individuals to navigate what specific foods and meals to choose to balance their blood sugar levels. Plus DayTwo’s glycemic control solution is more effective than existing protocols for prediabetes and more impactful than leading diabetes pharmaceuticals.
“We are undergoing a transformational change in healthcare when technology and machine learning can benefit patients with diabetes,” added Ofek Ventures managing partner Yahal Zilka. “After success in its initial market, we are excited to bring DayTwo to the U.S. where it has the potential to improve the lives of over one hundred million people with diabetes and prediabetes,” added Mr. Zilka, whose investment track record includes Waze, Argus, Onavo, DesignArt, Magisto (acquired by Google), Continental, Facebook, Qualcomm, and Vimeo, respectively.
DayTwo’s food-as-medicine approach is based on the original research conducted by Professors Eran Segal, Ph.D. and Eran Elinav, M.D., Ph.D. at The Weizmann Institute of Science published in the journal Cell in 2015. The Cell paper demonstrated how the gut microbiome in conjunction with other clinical and personal parameters can enable personalized dietary interventions that can successfully balance post-meal glucose response.
“Digital health solutions such as DayTwo’s accelerate treatment, disease prevention, and management of chronic illnesses,” explained aMoon Fund managing partner Yair Schindel, MD, MBA. “As a doctor who has witnessed first-hand the harmful effects of metabolic diseases, I am encouraged by the positive results among the tens of thousands of patients served by DayTwo. The company’s ability to make precision medicine accessible through their glycemic-control solution is helping people with diabetes today; I feel fortunate to witness this as the company expands to the United States.”
DayTwo launched in 2015 and it has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and San Francisco Bay Area with 75 employees. And DayTwo completed the first quarter of 2019 with tens of thousands of individual customers and hundreds of providers in the DayTwo clinician network. Plus DayTwo also launched a strategic partnership with the world’s second-largest HMO Clalit — which now offers the DayTwo glycemic control solution to its 4.5 million members.
“We partnered with DayTwo to realize the full potential of personalization in both preventative care and chronic condition management,” remarked Clalit Head Dietitian Irit Poraz. “The era of food-as-medicine is here. DayTwo is a pioneer that has brought the only evidence-based, actionable microbiome derived solution to the market. We are pleased to be able to leverage this science and actionability for our plan members.”
DayTwo continues to conduct ongoing research with clinical institutional partners including the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Israel Diabetes Association, Joslin Diabetes Center, Janssen a Pharmaceutical Company of Johnson & Johnson, and the Mayo Clinic. And DayTwo also depends on the counsel of their elite scientific advisory board composed of specialists from Tufts School of Nutrition, UCSF, and the Weizmann Institute of Science.
