Personalized Nutrition Provider DayTwo Secures US$12m Series A Financing Round
04 Jul 2017 --- DayTwo, a company specialized in microbiome-health management, has completed a US$12 million Series A round of financing through Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc. (JJDC), Seventure Partners’ Health for Life Capital fund, Mayo Clinic, co-founder Marius Nacht and other private investors.
The investment brings DayTwo’s total funding to US$17 million. Proceeds from the financing will be used to expand the company’s product, engineering and data science teams in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. In addition, DayTwo will deepen its clinical research with the Mayo Clinic and other gut-microbiome clinical research partners.
DayTwo is the first company to develop a method to accurately predict an individual’s glycemic response to specific foods and food combinations using an individual’s microbiome and other clinical factors. This evidence-based approach to nutrition is what enables DayTwo to bring personalized nutrition to market, and make personalized nutrition a reality for millions of people today.
“This ability to go beyond the informational offerings in the market, which are neither evidence-based, clinically proven, or actionable, makes DayTwo different and special. DayTwo will help people act upon a healthier, personalized diet, based on accurately predicting postprandial glycemic response,” says Nicholas Chia, Professor of Biophysics & Microbiome at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
The DayTwo approach to health and nutrition recognizes that every individual has a unique gut microbiome and may respond very differently to the same food or food combinations. The company is currently the only offering in the market that can bring a personalized diet and nutrition plan to individuals, based on accurately predicting their own glycemic response. As postprandial glycemic response (post-meal blood sugar) is an independent risk factor for multiple diseases and affects weight gain and fat storage, maintaining normal blood glucose levels requires a nutrition plan that is tailored to the individual.
DayTwo’s personalized nutrition offering is based on the original research led by Professors Eran Segal and Dr. Eran Elinav from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and published in the scientific journal Cell. Segal and Elinav found that by profiling an individual’s gut microbiome and leveraging machine learning, they can accurately predict an individual’s post-meal blood sugar response for unique foods and food combinations. This scientific and machine learning breakthrough has made personalized nutrition a reality today.
For consumers, DayTwo offers a cloud-based, first-of-its-kind, proprietary diet and nutrition planner, that enables individuals to get personalized scores for specific foods and food combinations based on their own gut-microbiome profile and other personal parameters.
For clinicians and health practitioners, DayTwo brings actionable insights for diet and nutrition to the care plans and meal plans for their patients, brings ease and convenience to adherence to a healthy diet, and provides an additional path for clinicians and their patients to stay connected. For nutrition, microbiome, weight-management and meal planning businesses, DayTwo offers an API to access the DayTwo platform-as-a-service to provide predictive glycemic response scores for specific foods and food combinations.
“We’ve just scratched the surface of how powerful the microbiome is to support personalized diet, nutrition and chronic condition management, to enable our customers to have the ability to live a full, happy and healthy lifestyle,” says DayTwo Chief Executive Officer Lihi Segal.
