Ayble Health

/ Startups / By
IMAGE: Taken at The Greater Boston Food Bank

Founder: Sam Jactel
Founding: 2020
Mission: Radically improve the standard of care for GI patients
Employees: 25 & 50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4.6M Raised
Investors: Inflect Health, M13, Founder Collective, Upfront Ventures
Key Customers: Employers & Health Plans
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $20M – $50M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Ayble Health is an end-to-end care platform for digestive health, utilizing technology like predictive AI to increase access to nutrition and behavioral therapy for more than 70M Americans who live with gut discomfort and make that care better, faster, and more personalized.

Sam Jactel had a problem. He had lived with IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) for 10 years. It even runs in his family. Lucky enough to have the privilege of incredible access to care, he was treated at hospital systems like Duke in Durham, Emory in Atlanta, Northwestern in Chicago, and Brigham in Boston too. But access wasn’t solving his discomfort.

GI doctors know that nutrition & psychology are incredibly powerful therapeutic tools to help digestive patients manage their symptoms; for some patients, clinical guidelines even recommend those treatment options before entering a clinical environment – i.e., seeing a doctor to receive care. And while those options were talked about, even at Harvard training hospitals like Brigham & Women’s, Sam never got the help he needed to use nutrition and psychology as tools to tackle his condition.

He would go to the doctor, take drugs, and was still sick. In and out of the hospital with flare ups frustrated by this Grand Canyon wide gap in care. Who was treating the whole patient? And where?

There are not enough GI dieticians or psychologists to treat patients. Up to 40% of Americans’ daily lives are being disrupted by digestive troubles and some 70M Americans suffer from GI diseases (src). There are 150 licensed GI psychologists nationwide to serve those patients… By comparison, it would be harder to get into ANY Ivy League university than see a GI psychologist. Like, 1000x harder to see a GI psychologist than get into Harvard statistically speaking.

Gastrointestinal disease can be found in 24% of America’s insured population (src). Over 60-70% of those affected have symptoms at least once a week, leading to large direct and indirect costs. From a direct perspective, GI disease is costing $135B+ in medical spend every year (these are 2015 numbers, and they’re rising!). Patients are visiting clinical environments 100M times per year, racking up the healthcare equivalent of frequent flier miles, but patients earn “platinum status” not in a good way. The drugs are expensive too and for 70% of patients they’re not enough alone to get better and stay better. Two thirds of GI patients are women and OBGYNs are neither dietitians nor gastroenterologists, so gaps in care are inevitable. 50% of GI patients have mental health comorbidities (src), and GI is a leading reason for lack of productivity and absenteeism in the workplace.

GI conditions are not well understood and are often caused by gut/brain connections. Digestion is governed by the enteric nervous system (you’re going to have to do more specific research there on your own!). Crohn’s, Colitis, or IBS can be stigmatizing, embarrassing, and challenging to manage, with a huge impact on quality of life. GI patients have been surveyed to say they would be willing to sacrifice 15 years of their remaining life expectancy for an immediate cure that doesn’t exist (src). 

Are you starting to see the problem?

So if nutrition and psych can help, how do you implement those tools in daily life? It’s difficult to figure out which foods cause symptoms. It takes analytics, correlation, and time that wicked smaht Bostonians don’t have. Sam would play around with his diet to try to narrow down the universe of foods to find his personal triggers, building spreadsheets and souping them up with macros from his analytics background to do so. This approach was transformational for Sam’s own health, and he then brought clinical experts in – academics & doctors – to validate the science, scale the tool and tackle psychology too. This was the foundation of Ayble Health.

What started as an Excel spreadsheet has now been transformed into an end-to-end care platform built to scale access to specialized nutrition and psychology therapy and make GI therapy better, faster, and more personalized. Using advanced nutrition techniques, powered by AI, their team helps patients find and remove trigger foods to live better lives. Their app has a library of grocery store products filtered by ingredients to help find compatible foods. And using Headspace-like psychology exercises, Ayble helps patients break the stress-symptom downwards spiral.

Humans are in the loop to provide coaching & guidance as patients progress through their journey. Their core differentiator? This stuff works. After years doing research backed by 14 clinical studies, they’re going commercial. The proof is in the poop, I mean pudding.

2023 was a critical year of validation as their first year “out in the wild”. Now, Ayble Health is building out partnerships with jumbo employer clients, health insurers, leading health systems & providers to enhance the current healthcare ecosystem, not replace it. 

The team has treated thousands of patients so far, overperforming on outcomes, and improving the platform every day as they add enterprise contracts to get millions of patients access to Ayble at no cost. They’re already working with multiple large state based health plans, 75% of the Top 10 academic medical centers in the country, and several F500 type employers. Next year they hope to widen access to 10s of millions.

Sam & the team are hiring across the board, investing in core platform differentiators and wanting to be in every conversation related to GI with the patient at the center. More specifically, their 25-30 person team will be growing this year across Product, Sales, Clinical, and Customer Success. 

Ayble is a tool he wishes existed when he was diagnosed, driving meaningful change and increased access to millions. They’ll continue to advocate for patients and their voices. The signals are starting to align that they’re building the right thing for people at the right time. Ayble Health aspires to be an anchor Boston startup, building here because they believe it’s the best place in the world to build a healthtech company.  

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Ayble Health team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

  • Head of Product
  • Commercial / Sales Lead
  • Provider (MD)
  • Digestive Nurse Practitioner
  • Digestive Health Coach

Reach out to careers@ayblehealth.com to discuss!

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the major initiatives as you enter the growth stage in 2024?
  • What is the core distribution strategy – is it through employers or consumers?
  • What are some key risks to mitigate over the next 24 months?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Ayble Health you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more GI healthcare into the digital age. All gastro patients applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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