Berry Street, a U.S. startup that connects patients with registered dietitians through insurance-covered telehealth visits, announced on August 24, 2026 that it is merging with Healthify, the India-founded nutrition app known in the U.S. as HealthifyMe, in a deal aimed at scaling AI-powered nutrition coaching amid explosive demand tied to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. The merger, reported by TechCrunch and MobiHealthNews, combines two companies built on opposite sides of the nutrition-tech market — one an app-first consumer product with tens of millions of users, the other a clinician network plugged into U.S. health insurance.
Two Companies, One Bet on GLP-1
The rise of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound has reshaped the nutrition and weight-management industry over the past three years, driving demand for dietitians who can help patients manage side effects, preserve muscle mass, and plan meals while on the medications. Berry Street built a network of more than 2,000 clinics and dietitians who bill through insurance, positioning itself as a service layer for the millions of Americans now on GLP-1 prescriptions. Healthify, founded in India and rebranded as HealthifyMe for global markets, took a different route, building a consumer app used by more than 45 million people across over 20 countries, monetized through subscriptions rather than insurance billing.
What the Combined Company Looks Like
The merged company will operate under the Berry Street brand in the United States while retaining the Healthify name in India and other international markets, and will be led by co-CEOs Noah Kotlove, Berry Street’s founder, and Tushar Vashisht, Healthify’s founder. Financial terms of the all-stock merger were not disclosed. The strategic logic, according to both companies, is combining Healthify’s AI technology with Berry Street’s clinician network and U.S. insurance infrastructure — giving Berry Street’s insurance-covered patients access to Healthify’s food-logging AI, and giving Healthify’s consumer subscribers a path to insurance-billed dietitian visits it previously lacked.
The AI at the Center: Ria
Healthify’s core technology asset is Ria, a multimodal, multilingual AI nutrition coach with patented food-recognition capability that can estimate a meal’s nutritional content from a single photograph in under a second, without requiring a user to manually search a food database or even open the app in some integrations. That kind of frictionless logging has been one of the persistent failure points of nutrition apps for two decades — studies of MyFitnessPal and similar apps have long shown that manual food-diary entry drops off sharply within weeks, undermining the data clinicians need to give useful advice. By automating that step with computer vision, Healthify aims to keep the data flowing long enough for Berry Street’s dietitians to act on it.
A Crowded, Consolidating Market
The Berry Street-Healthify deal is part of a broader wave of consolidation in digital nutrition and metabolic health this year, as venture-funded apps built during the pandemic-era telehealth boom search for durable business models. Competitors including Noom, WeightWatchers (which has pivoted heavily into GLP-1 prescribing), and Season Health have all reworked their offerings around medication management rather than standalone calorie tracking. Industry analysts covering the deal noted that insurance reimbursement, not app downloads, has become the key differentiator, since GLP-1 patients typically need sustained clinical support that pure consumer subscriptions struggle to fund without membership fatigue setting in.
Skepticism About AI Nutrition Coaching
Registered dietitians have raised concerns about how much clinical nuance an AI coach can capture from a food photo alone, noting that portion sizes, cooking methods, and hidden ingredients are notoriously hard to estimate visually, and that patients on GLP-1 medications often have complex, individualized nutritional needs — including risks of muscle loss and micronutrient deficiencies — that a photo-based estimate cannot fully address. The companies have framed Ria explicitly as a data-collection and engagement tool that feeds human dietitians, rather than a replacement for clinical judgment, a distinction that regulators and insurers are likely to scrutinize closely as reimbursement models expand.
What’s Next
The combined company has said it plans to integrate Ria into Berry Street’s clinical workflow over the coming months, giving U.S. dietitians access to Healthify’s photo-logging data for patients enrolled through insurance. With GLP-1 prescriptions still climbing and payers increasingly demanding evidence that nutrition support improves outcomes and controls costs, the merged company is positioning itself as a full-stack alternative to piecing together separate apps, coaches, and prescribers — a bet that scale and combined AI-plus-clinician data will outcompete rivals still choosing between the consumer app model and the insurance-billed clinical model.
Photo: MabelAmber / PIXABAY via Pixabay
