Zipongo, a San Francisco, CA-based personalized digital nutrition platform has raised $18 million in Series B funding led Mayfield with participation from Excel Venture Management. The company plans to utilize the funding to expand its operations further enabling Nutriomics and behavior science to empower health providers and disease management systems to measurably leverage food as medicine..
Founded by Jason Langheier, MD, MPH in 2010, Zipongo provides a software-as-a-service platform that enables digital nutrition coaching for large employers, health plans and health systems, and provides food utility tools to families to select and buy healthy food. Dr. Langheier was inspired to launch Zipongo after helping launch the pediatric obesity clinic at Boston Medical Center, and build it based on science, rooted in training from Harvard’s Nutrition Department, Duke University Medical School and the University of California at San Francisco Biostatistics and Pediatrics clinical research teams.
Science of Nutriomics
The company will also expand on its research and development of Nutriomics—the study of personalizing food recommendations based on bodily measures of genetics, metabolomics, immune-response and the microbiome, and a person’s nutrition status, food buying, tastes and food environment, to optimize measures of health, emotional and performance outcomes. Further study will enable health providers and health systems to prescribe Food as Medicine to more sustainably prevent and support care of many disease states—from diabetes to inflammatory bowel disease to cancers, when paired with food utility tools that make it easy to eat well
Today, over 150 companies and the majority of national health plans and wellness platforms work with Zipongo to drive engagement, health impact, cost savings and happiness of their people.
“Humanity needs to feed nearly 10 billion souls by 2050, in a way that both eradicates chronic disease and sustains Earth. In the face of that daunting challenge, we feel grateful to have so many engaged clients and users, as well as investors with so much experience in Enterprise Software-as-a-Service, Healthcare, Personalized Medicine, Data Science and Consumer Engagement, who are helping us build a company that delivers long-term value. It takes a large village—and patient persistence—to feed such a big family, well,” said Dr. Langheier, Founder & CEO.