A San Francisco-based telehealth company that provides personalized nutrition counseling and "foodscripts" through healthcare providers has nearly tripled its total funding with a $200 million investment from TPG's Rise Fund.
Foodsmart announced the fresh funding on Wednesday but declined to disclose its valuation.
The company confirmed that the Series D round is all-equity and entirely financed by private equity firm TPG through its Rise Fund, which launched in 2016 in collaboration with Bono and Jeff Skoll as an impact fund.
The Rise Fund now has $18 billion of assets under management, according to PitchBook.
CEO Jason Langheier founded Foodsmart, legally known as Zipongo, in 2010.
“TPG Rise has expertise supporting innovative and needed solutions for underserved patients to become permanent fixtures in the fabric of healthcare. We look forward to working together to expand our capabilities, our reach and our impact,” Langheier said in a statement.
The company says it has 2.2 million members and more than 700 registered dieticians who create customized meal plans that can be tailored for specific health conditions. Its website touts gut health, weight management, maternity and heart health among the conditions it can support.
It also helps members manage food benefits, known as SNAP, and has a shopping integration with Instacart.
In 2018, Foodsmart launched a program called "Foodscripts," which allows healthcare providers to refer patients to the program.
It offers monthly memberships that people can pay for out of pocket for $69 or get covered through insurance for free, according to its website, including Medicare and Medicaid plans.
Foodsmart doesn't prescribe medications to patients, but in a press release announcing TPG's eye-popping $200 million investment, the company highlighted its ability to support members who use "higher cost interventions" such as GLP-1 obesity medications like Ozempic and bariatric surgery.
The company does this "by helping them improve their food buying environment and eating habits before, during, and after those interventions, to enable the opportunity to sustain their health improvements for the long run," the press release said.
A new class of obesity medications has exploded onto the market in recent years.
Perhaps the most famous option is Ozempic, a semaglutide injection, which was approved in the U.S. for adults with Type 2 diabetes in 2017.
The FDA approved another semaglutide injection, Wegovy, in 2021 for adults with certain weight-related conditions such as high cholesterol, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes.
Wegovy and Ozempic are both produced by Novo Nordisk.
So-called anti-obesity medications became a $6 billion market by early 2023 and could grow to $100 billion by 2030, according to a Goldman Sachs report from last year.
Prior to TPG's investment, Foodsmart had raised around $90 million in equity-based funding including a Series C round that opened in 2021 with $25 million and grew to $40 million by early 2024, according to an Axios report in January.
Foodsmart's Series D brings the company's total equity funding to just shy of $290 million.
Previous investors include Seventure Partners, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Advocate Aurora Enterprises, Mayfield Fund, New Ground Ventures, The Social Entrepreneurs Fund, Alchemist Accelerator, Founder Collective and UCSF Rosenman Institute.
In 2020, the company also received a Paycheck Protection Program loan for more than $900,000 which was forgiven, according to Propublica.
