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NUE Life, a Miami startup developing a nextgen mental wellness solution, has raised a $3.3 million seed round.
Investors include a who’s who of new-to-Miami investors, including Jack Abraham of Atomic Ventures, venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, Jon Oringer of Shutterstock and Pareto Holdings, serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, James Bailey and Christina Getty.
NUE Life’s co-founders are Juan Pablo Cappello and Demian Bellumio—two well-known Miami tech entrepreneurs involved in multiple startups over the years -- as well as Katie Kiernan (Twyla), Kazi (Zayn) Hassan, M.D. and investor Christina Getty. The whole founding team are people of color and women, making the company unique in the alternative medicine space
NUE Life is a public benefit corporation and focused on leveraging emerging technologies to combat the mental wellness crisis and drive better outcomes, said Cappello, CEO. “One out of five women is taking an depressant. Any given day 22 veterans commit suicide, a day, we lose 22 veterans. And we have about a million veterans on disability for PTSD and treatment resistant depression. These are heartbreaking statistics, and we believe that tech can be a force for good.”
Dr. Kazi (Zayn) Hassan, Chief Medical Officer at NUE Life, recognizes that medical providers want to provide better care, however they need support in provider tools and resources to do so. “Many providers who want to help patients with tools like ketamine lack the confidence or support needed. NUEue’s focus is to develop tools for providers and patients to accelerate the adoption of innovative medicines and medical frameworks, and help a growing community of providers deliver high-quality care,” said Dr. Hassan, whose company My Ketamine Home was acquired by NUE Life.
Bellumio, NUE Life’s CTO, drew on his deep experience with AI and graph databases to create a holistic solution. He formerly worked on graph databases while at both Accenture and at NEORIS and at his own former startups.
“What we're trying to do with this technology is create a companion to our patients for their mental wellness journeys,” Bellumio said. “When people are dealing with different issues, you need to be there all the time and that's what we're creating -- personalized assistance to provide anything that the patient needs on a daily basis -- recommendations for treatment, recommendations for music, recommendations for supplements. So it's about really understanding the patient holistically and we use a framework, a detailed knowledge graph, to understand the physical, the mental and behavioral components of the patient and accompany them on their daily journey.”
NUE Life operates in California, Texas and Florida, with plans for nationwide expansion. The platform will initially offer at-home ketamine therapy, combined with music therapies and other personalized recommendations through an app, but Cappello said the vision is to expand with other treatments and technologies aimed at attacking the mental wellness crisis.
Bellumio adds, “It's just amazing to have this great cap table of people supporting us and I told Francis [Suarez] yesterday that we need to make Miami the capital of mental wellness.”
This was originally published on Refresh Miami by Nancy Dahlberg and can be found here.
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