People’s growing interest in their gut health is colliding with the boom of harnessing AI for health and wellness, spawning startups like Throne, whose testing device attaches to toilets, and Zoe, which sells at-home testing kits and personalized dietary plans.
Last year alone saw $500 million in venture capital invested in gut health startups, but there’s still a lot the scientific community doesn’t know. And by extension, neither do the AI models trained on scientific literature. This leaves founders in a gray zone about how to offer answers on this complex system we don’t yet fully understand.
It is undeniable that people are increasingly turning to AI for health questions. Every week, more than 200 million people ask ChatGPT a health-related question, with 7 out of 10 prompts sent outside of normal clinic hours.
Meanwhile, the popularity of weight-loss drugs, combined with a growing awareness of proper fiber intake and the rising rates of colon cancer, has supercharged consumer interest in gut health.
Fibermaxxing
The microbiome craze has emerged out of a few sweeping changes in consumer behavior. More Americans are taking GLP-1 drugs, and some are finding that they can cause gastrointestinal distress as a side effect. There’s simultaneously more awareness about the health impacts of ultra-processed foods. As a result, a whole community of nutritionists and clinicians is hopping on social media channels and tapping into users’ insatiable desire to be gut-healthy.
“On TikTok, there’s a huge swath of influencers and everyday people talking about this new supplement they tried,” said Caroline Lippman, who invests in consumer health startups at Coefficient Capital. “People know what Ashwagandha is, and what L-theanine is,” she added.
Last year, this growing consumer appetite for more gut-friendly diets turned prebiotic soda company Poppi into a $1.95 billion acquisition for PepsiCo. The company had previously raised about $39 million in VC funding from CAVU Consumer Partners and a slew of celebrities, per PitchBook’s data.
At the same time, as part of the current AI boom, consumers have embraced chatbots and other technologies to help them better understand their health. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have unveiled systems in the past three months that offer more reliable wellness advice based on individuals’ medical histories.
“The platform LLMs became the digital front door of healthcare, and it happened instantly, before anyone could have ever predicted it,” said Kristen Valdes, founder and CEO of B.well, a digital health startup that runs the health data connectivity infrastructure for OpenAI for Health.
Data on every possible health metric has never been more valuable to everyday consumers, and startups are capitalizing by providing new streams of data and personalized health recommendations. Services like Function Health‘s biomarker testing subscription and Prenuvo‘s full-body scans are in vogue in Silicon Valley.
“We’re actively building that feature right now, we call it the gut health coach,” said Scott Hickle, the founder of Throne, which sells an attachable device for your toilet that analyses bowel and urinary health.
But Hickle and others are finding that giving clear-cut answers to gut health questions is not an easy task.
“We humans work best when we can break things down to simple linear relationships: More of this is good, less of this is bad. But that’s just not how the gut microbiome works,” Hickle said.
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A sea of unknowns
The gut microbiome is a notoriously complex, intricate system that takes a whole host of inputs—environmental factors, stress, nutritional intake, hydration—and produces often unexplainable outputs.
That raises questions about VC-backed gut health testing startups.
“There are companies that will give you tailored data and say, ‘You should purchase this probiotic from us to address this imbalance,’” said Max Brondfield, an assistant professor in the division of gastroenterology at the University of California, San Francisco. “To that, I would preach a lot of caution.”
Khosla Ventures-backed Viome, for example, says that its database of samples, together with machine learning technology that synthesizes that data, can offer more personalized recommendations than a dietician. “There’s actually a big difference between a standard nutritionist and what you get from Viome,” said Naveen Jain, founder and CEO of the company. “If you go to a dietician, you’re going to get the same generic advice.”
That degree of personalization is undoubtedly appealing to the tech-savvy consumer. But there are still so many interactions in the microbiome that we don’t understand, according to Brondfield. “I see a number of patients who have done these tests,” said Brondfield. “They’ll say, ‘I tried the recommended probiotic, and it didn’t do anything.’”
Viome has come under scrutiny for marketing customized supplements to users after they receive the results of its testing kit.
That degree of uncertainty is especially difficult in a consumer category where moats are thin and users want answers, not a shrug of the shoulders.
“As investors, one of the things we think about is what are the things you can do to build trust among the skeptics,” said Lisa Wu, a partner at Norwest who invested in Ritual, a women’s-health-focused supplements brand.
Still, Wu and others remain enthusiastic about the gut wellness craze.
“We love fiber. There’s a lot of research behind fiber. We think there are new opportunities to make fiber sexy,” Wu said.
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