NUE Life Health raises $3.3M for its psychedelics-meets-tech mental wellness platform – TechCrunch

NUE Life Health, a telemedicine startup in the U.S., is developing what it describes as a “next-generation mental wellness solution” employing treatments such as psychedelic-assisted therapies, combined with a graph database-driven app.

The Miami-based startup has raised a $3.3 million seed round from investors including Jack Abraham (Atomic Ventures, Hims), Shervin Pishevar (formerly of Sherpa Ventures, UBER), Martin Varsavsky (Prelude Fertility, Overture), Jon Oringer (Shutterstock, Pareto Holdings), James Bailey (a capstone supporter of the Multidisciplinary Assoc. for Psychedelic Studies) and Christina Getty. All the above are part of the recent diaspora from Silicon Valley to Miami.

NUE Life Health is currently operating in California, Texas and Florida, with plans for expansion across the United States. The platform will offer at-home ketamine therapy, considered the fastest-acting anti-depressant in the market, combined with music therapies and a data-led approach.

NUE Life says research from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Imperial College in London on MDMA and psilocybin assisted psychotherapy appears to indicate that these are “safe alternatives” in treating mental illness.

Juan Pablo Cappello, NUE Life’s CEO said: “We view ketamine therapy and psychedelic therapy simply as catalysts for change. While helping patients reset is important, we at NUE Life are committed to helping our members find community and connection through our digital platform well after the effects of any psychedelic therapies have faded.”

NUE Life’s digital platform will leverage “Knowledge Graphs and AI to deliver personalized evidence-based therapies that approach patient care in a holistic manner,” said Demian Bellumio, co-founder and CTO of NUE Life Health. Its enterprise HIPPA-compliant health platform plans to launch in the late summer of 2021.

Christina Getty, a co-founder and investor in NUE Life Health, said: “With one of five women in the United States relying on an antidepressant to get through the day, and with our losing 22 veterans a day to suicide, we felt compelled to launch a different kind of mental wellness company.”

NUE Life comes as players in psychedelic medicine such as MindMed and ATAI are going public.

Bellumio said the platform creates a detailed “knowledge graph” of the patient. This allows it to understand everything about them in order to diagnose and treat their mental health condition, using an approach called integrated psychiatry. AI algorithms are then deployed to personalize recommendations, from which treatments to use, which supplements to take and which music to listen to during therapy. A proprietary music streaming service will be part of the offering.

Bellumio formerly worked on graph databases while at Accenture (where he ran the Knowledge Graph Center of Excellence for two years) and at NEORIS. The approach is also employed by United Healthcare, user its “Connected Healthcare” platform.