London-based nutrition company Zoe has raised $15 million in a Series B extension to expand its U.S. presence.
Here's how it works: Zoe sends customers take-home testing materials and draws their blood or stool samples to test blood fats, blood sugar levels, and the health of their gut microbiome. Based on the results, the company assigns a score (on a scale of 0 to 100) to every food item, which can help people make better dietary choices.
Zoe's nutrition tracking program includes blood glucose monitoring. (Image courtesy of Zoe)Image courtesy of Zoe /
Along the way, Zoe teaches users how to swap, add, or combine foods to eat in the way that best suits their body — for example, she might advise swapping out peanut butter, banana, and sliced almonds on toast for cream cheese, avocado, and chia seeds — and tracks users' progress with ongoing tests of their gut microbiome.
The new investment comes from US-based investment firm Coefficiency Capital and brings Zoe's total funding to date to $118 million, including a capital increase of £25 million ($30 million at current exchange rates) in 2022.
The latest funding comes following the completion of a randomized controlled trial, published in Nature Medicine in May 2024, that examined the effects of personalized nutrition on cardiometabolic health. It's one of 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers published by Zoe in the past seven years, countering the perception that microbiome mapping is a shaky science.
The company's CEO, Jonathan Wolf, described the trial as the “gold standard in medicine,” similar to what's done with vaccines and medicines: a full trial that compares an intervention (in this case, Zoe's membership) to a control group, which could be the basic standard of care or dietary guidelines in the US.
What's interesting is that, aside from knowing the results, researchers are also obligated to publish their results, whatever they may be.
“As CEO, I'm scared to participate in this RCT because I feel a sense of responsibility,” Wolf told TechCrunch. “If it turns out Zoe doesn't work, we'll have to make that public.”
The study found that Zoe did work, “outperforming the control group overall,” Wolf said. The results showed that after three to four months of Zoe use, biological markers improved and it had a positive effect on people's mood, which Wolf said he didn't expect. For example, Zoe users reported improved mood, sleep and energy.
Weight loss has been a trend for some time, but it's especially popular now with the rise of injectable GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. But Wolfe made it clear that Zoe isn't targeting weight loss. Instead, the company is focused on nutrition, and improved nutrition often leads to weight loss.
“Nutrition is horribly under-researched because there's no pharmaceutical money in it,” Wolf says, “so a lot of the advice is, 'Eat more vegetables.' And it turns out that most of the advice we've been taught is simply wrong. For example, if you want to lose weight, you should go on a calorie-restricted diet. All of the latest nutrition science says that calorie-restricted diets don't work for 80 percent of people.”
Wolf declined to share financial figures, but said the company had virtually no revenue two years ago. Today, the company has grown to more than 100,000 paying customers, most of whom buy 12-month subscriptions that cost $29 a month or $348 a year in the U.S.
The company's products are available throughout the United States except New York due to regulatory challenges that Wolf and his team are working through. The new funding will help the company expand its presence in the United States.
“We're going to start investing in marketing because we know there are millions of people in the U.S. that we can help,” Wolf said. “For the first time, the product is ready and mature enough that we can execute on it.”