Levels, an NYC startup that aims to help people understand how their diet affects their day-to-day health, announced Tuesday it closed on a $12 million seed round. The company plans to use this fresh funding to bring its biowearable technology into the mainstream market in order to improve metabolic health.
Just 12 percent of the U.S. population is considered metabolically healthy, and millions of Americans suffer from issues related to metabolic dysfunction including diabetes, obesity, anxiety and chronic pain.
Levels believes that if we continuously monitor our glucose levels and then eat according to what our body needs, we can reverse this trend. The company does this with its biowearable technology, which a user attaches to their arm for two weeks at a time.
In the same way fitness trackers quantify physical activity and exercise, Levels’ device measures the impact of one’s diet and lifestyle on their metabolic health through continuous glucose monitoring and its software.
“By leveraging continuous glucose monitoring, Levels helps users close the loop between overall health and daily choices around food, exercise, sleep and stress management to support long-term metabolic health,” Levels co-founder and president Josh Clemente said in a statement. “You shouldn’t need a Ph.D. in nutrition or human physiology to know what to eat for lunch. Levels is the first product that takes the guesswork out of daily lifestyle choices with personalized, objective data.”
This seed round was led by major Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from a team of prominent angel investors including Netflix’s co-founder and former CEO Marc Randolph and former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Levels is currently in closed beta and claims to have more than 50,000 people on its waitlist. The device will be available for purchase in early 2021.
Dr. Casey Means, Levels’ co-founder and chief medical officer, attributes the company’s early success in part to the burgeoning health monitoring industry as a whole.
Indeed, several other startups have been making headlines this year for their wearable technology’s ability to monitor everyone from seniors to folks with sleep apnea to COVID-19 patients. Plus, health monitoring startup Whoop became one of Boston’s newest unicorns after a $100 million Series E in October.
Now, Means says Levels is hoping to tackle metabolic dysfunction, which has reached “epidemic level proportions” in this country.
“Levels gives people the tools they need to improve their health, and our vision is to provide integrated technology that tracks key metrics related to metabolic health and longevity in near-real-time, and to provide actionable feedback on how individuals can improve their lives,” Means told Built In via email. “We have the opportunity to radically change health and well-being at scale by empowering individuals with health data, and this is what excites us.”
