DayTwo, the microbiome human discovery platform that offers a glycemic control solution for people with type 2 diabetes, announced USD 31 million in Series B financing.
DayTwo will use the funding to accelerate go-to-market initiatives in the United States where the company partners with payers, providers, and employers, and to continue to develop a new generation of products and services for metabolic and gastrointestinal conditions.
The round was co-led by aMoon, the leading life sciences venture fund, together with Ofek Ventures, a new venture fund focused on disruptive ICT technologies. Existing investors Seventure Partners and Johnson & Johnson continued their participation in the round. Previous funding rounds included contributions from the Mayo Clinic for the company's validation trial, recently published in JAMA. The financing brings DayTwo's total funding to USD 48 million.
"DayTwo is the only evidence-based, actionable, microbiome platform in the market today. We are in a privileged position to leverage our experience including first-rate science, clinical trials in Israel and the United States, tens of thousands of customers, and provider, employer, and payer relationships", said Lihi Segal, CEO and Founder of DayTwo.
"This deep and broad foundation, coupled with this financing, enables DayTwo to address the large and pressing clinical need to bring food-as-medicine to market for people with type 2 diabetes in the United States", she added.
In addition, DayTwo is looking into corporation with potential new partners to enter the Asia-Pacific markets, where more than 60 per cent of the people with diabetes live. India is an important market in the world, thus DayTwo is open for opportunities from potential partners in India.
DayTwo's glycemic control solution uses gut profiling and other clinical parameters to provide a food-as-medicine solution to enable glycemic control. DayTwo's personalized approach provides actionable insights into how the body metabolizes food and allows individuals to navigate what specific foods and meals to choose to balance their blood sugar levels. DayTwo's glycemic control solution is more effective than existing protocols for prediabetes and more impactful than leading diabetes pharmaceuticals.
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"We are undergoing a transformational change in healthcare, when technology and machine learning can benefit patients with diabetes", said Yahal Zilka, Managing Partner at Ofek Ventures.
"After success in its initial market, we are excited to bring DayTwo to the U.S. where it has the potential to improve the lives of over one hundred million people with diabetes and prediabetes", added Zilka, whose investment track record includes Waze, Argus, Onavo, DesignArt, Magisto (acquired by Google), Continental, Facebook, Qualcomm, and Vimeo, respectively.
"Digital health solutions such as DayTwo's accelerate treatment, disease prevention, and management of chronic illnesses", remarked Yair Schindel, M.D., M.B.A., and Managing Partner aMoon Fund.
"As a doctor who has witnessed first-hand the harmful effects of metabolic diseases, I am encouraged by the positive results among the tens of thousands of patients served by DayTwo. The company's ability to make precision medicine accessible through their glycemic-control solution is helping people with diabetes today; I feel fortunate to witness this as the company expands to the United States", he added.
DayTwo's food-as-medicine approach is based on the original research conducted by Professors Eran Segal, PhD, and Eran Elinav, M.D., PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, published in the journal, Cell, in 2015.
The cell paper demonstrated how the gut microbiome, in conjunction with other clinical and personal parameters, can enable personalized dietary interventions that can successfully balance post-meal glucose response.
Founded in 2015, DayTwo has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and San Francisco Bay Area, with 75 employees. The company completed the first quarter of 2019 with tens of thousands of individual customers, and hundreds of providers in the DayTwo clinician network. DayTwo also launched a strategic partnership with the world's second largest HMO, Clalit which now offers the DayTwo glycemic control solution to its 4.5 million members.
"We partnered with DayTwo to realize the full potential of personalization in both preventative care and chronic condition management", said Irit Poraz, Head Dietitian, at Clalit.
"The era of food-as-medicine is here. DayTwo is a pioneer that has brought the only evidence-based, actionable microbiome derived solution to the market. We are pleased to be able to leverage this science and actionability for our plan members", he added.
DayTwo continues to conduct ongoing research with clinical institutional partners including the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Israel Diabetes Association, Joslin Diabetes Center, Janssen a Pharmaceutical Company of Johnson & Johnson, and the Mayo Clinic.
DayTwo also depends on the counsel of their elite scientific advisory board composed of specialists from Tufts School of Nutrition, UCSF, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. DayTwo has published papers based on their science, results and work pioneering food-as-medicine offerings in Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature, JAMA, and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
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