Healthycell recently announced that it surpassed its $1.5 million Bridge Round, securing $1.62 million led by Keen Growth Capital with participation from the Balanced Breakfast Fund. The investment will enable Healthycell to accelerate customer acquisition, expand into brick-and-mortar retail, build out its consumer test kit offering, and complete IRB-approved clinical studies.
The Verona, New Jersey-based nutrition company uses patent-pending Microgel technology in their ingestible gel dietary supplement products which can be taken straight from the gel pack, mixed into drinks, or blended into smoothies.
Bioavailability
The technology ensures maximum absorption into the body by releasing extremely small, ultra-bioavailable, soluble nutrient particles in the digestive tract. Healthycell’s founder and CEO, Douglas Giampapa, told us that the new funding will help the company wrap up studies that demonstrate these absorption capabilities.
“We know that solubility is a prerequisite for bioavailability. Since our MICROGEL supplements are fully soluble, they are more bioavailable than most competing pill-form options. With our clinical study, we believe we will be able to put some hard numbers behind how much more bioavailable our solution is compared to the alternatives,” said Giampapa.
No gelling out
The investment comes amid rapid company growth, with Healthycell recently hitting several key milestones, including over 1,000 new customers per month, achieving industry-high retention rates, and completing its prototypes for direct-to-consumer test kits.
"We are excited to expand our portfolio with the addition of Healthycell, an exciting company on the forefront of industry innovation that believes evidence-based nutrition is critical to meet growing consumer performance expectations for natural health solutions," said Jonathan Smiga, managing partner of Keen Growth Capital.
Merging the core pillars
HealthyCell’s current line of offerings include Focus+Recall, REM Sleep, Bioactive Multi, Vegan Essentials and Immune Super Boost.
"We believe the future of human nutrition lies at the intersection of three core pillars: (1) Pill-free, ultra-absorption delivery systems, (2) Validation on an N=1 basis with personalized biomarker test kits, and (3) Personalization that is recalibrated periodically," explained Giampapa. “By looking at what consumers are demanding and what competing companies are doing. It seems that most of the cutting-edge companies are siloed into one of the three pillars, but the winner will be the company that can merge them all seamlessly in a synergistic manner where the outcome is easily understood, used, and valued by the consumer.”
Giampapa added that with the help of partnerships with CLIA-certified 3rd-party laboratories, the company will launch test kits in Q4 this year. These include a micronutrients test, an immune system test, a telomere length test, and an aging rate test.
With a small blood sample, consumers will be able to take specific tests before and after intervention with HealthyCell’s supplement offerings to assess how well they are working.
“This means they don't need to take things on blind faith anymore,” said Giampapa.
