Clinics offering wraparound care for people taking weight loss drugs have become high-growth businesses, attractive to investors.

The GLP-1 class of anti-obesity drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound have not only changed the way people think about weight loss, they are also changing the way investors view online obesity clinics. These are suddenly looking like a much more investable prospect.
Dietrich Aumann of Helsana HealthInvest, a Swiss health insurance CVC, believes that the medical breakthroughs have given obesity clinics providing GLP-1 drugs an efficacy boost that now makes them scalable businesses.
In November, Helsana HealthInvest co-led the $20.2m series A funding round into Yazen, a Swedish startup that assigns a doctor to people taking these drugs, as well as providing wraparound care from a dietician, personal trainer and psychologist.
Aumann says that the drugs alone are not enough. People can only reliably make progress on their weight loss journey if they are given the proper support. He is betting that this full package is something customers will be willing to pay extra for.
“We saw purely behavioural change companies that churned 30% of customers a month, so weren’t sustainable businesses,” he says.
“Then we saw GLP-1 drugs that also churned patients every month if they weren’t combined with GPs and other healthcare assistants.”
Aumann believes Yazen can position itself as an attractive option to customers who know what kind of healthcare they want and are willing to pay out of pocket for it.
“There’s poles. [One is] the middle-aged men in Lycra who want TRT [testosterone replacement therapy] against the advice of their urologist. On the other pole, there are people getting care through hospitals to treat a chronic disease,” he says.
“Yazen sits in the middle. It’s for people frustrated with the healthcare system’s response, which assigns blame to people and says that obese people just need to make a lifestyle change.”
Other companies seem to share Aumann’s optimism. Holistic obesity treatment services like Yazen’s are becoming more commonplace. In December, the women’s health telemedicine provider Wisp formed a strategic partnership with Nourish, a nutritional health platform. This allows patients accessing GLP-1 medication from Wisp to also receive dietary plans from Nourish.
Aumann thinks the secret to a good startup’s staying power in this field will come from building a strong grassroots community, like Weight Watchers or the charity Alcoholics Anonymous. This will allow them to avoid competing in a race to the bottom on price.
“Ok, it’s not super hard differentiation like an Nvidia GPU that does the job faster than anybody else. It’s soft differentiation: do you provide a holistic care framework and community, or are you just a pill mill?”
Expanding markets, shrinking waistlines
Fredrik Meurling, Yazen’s founder and CEO, stresses the importance of providing a community for users where they can share their experiences and encourage each other.
“The coaches and doctors have said it helps a lot that the other patients speak to each other,” he says.
“These groups are quite vulnerable. They often feel quite alone. They have been suppressed in the healthcare system and been told a lot of times to shape up, eat less, move more. And it’s not that easy. The biology is against you.”
Yazen’s November funding round was raised to bankroll their international expansion. A month later, it moved into Denmark by acquiring Medstart, a Danish weight loss clinic.
Expanding through other countries will be the test of whether they are a scalable proposition, as Dietrich Aumann believes. So far, besides Sweden and Denmark, the service is offered in Norway, the Netherlands and Spain.
“There is a big need for this kind of [holistic] treatment,” says Meurling. “And generally, the healthcare systems don’t think it’s their role always to take resources [from other priority areas] and help obese people. I think there is a big gap in the market for this kind of service.”
While Yazen targets consumers willing to pay out of pocket for treatment they feel is denied by their local health system, a UK healthtech startup has shown that a business offering comprehensive diabetes and obesity treatment can tap into both paying consumers and a state healthcare provider.
Not-so-little Britain
The UK has one of the highest obesity rates in Europe. In 2022-23, it was estimated by government statisticians to be around 26% of adults. By comparison, the countries Yazen operates in all had a rate below 20% in 2022, according to EU statistics.
Chris Edson co-founded Second Nature in 2015, where it began as an app-based psychological counselling service to help improve the eating habits of pre-diabetic patients. Early on, the business model relied on contracts with Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), which referred pre-diabetic patients to them. It then expanded to provide a direct-to-consumer offering.
When GLP-1 drugs became widely available, Edson challenged his own thinking on obesity.
“At first, I was really sceptical. As a company, our mission statement was that you didn’t need drugs, you can do this with behavioural change. I had to re-evaluate our worldview when I saw the medication achieve such incredible outcomes.”
He came to see that for some people obesity was as much of a physiological challenge as a psychological one. While Second Nature already had a track record for treating the behaviours and mindset that prolong obesity, he became convinced that GLP-1 drugs had a crucial role to play in tackling the hormone-driven causes, such as excess hunger and cravings.
Now Second Nature has approval from the UK’s health regulators to deliver the medicine alongside wraparound care into the NHS to treat patients, while also providing a direct-to-consumer offering.
Edson thinks supplying the NHS and consumers directly is “synergistic”.
“If you only sell to the NHS, the reality is that you can get away with not having a very good product. But consumers have a very high expectation of services that they pay for,” he says.
“Selling to the NHS helps us sell to consumers [in turn] because they see we are selling medical grade, quality products.”
GLP-1 drugs are expected to be made widely available on the NHS over the coming years, according to a BBC report. Wegovy is already available, and another, Mounjaro, will probably be offered from March. The government has also spoken about plans to give the drugs to obese people in long-term unemployment.
As with Yazen, insurance providers have taken note. Second Nature’s $10m series A funding round in 2020 saw participation from Uniqa Ventures, the CVC arm of Austrian health insurance company Uniqa.
The biotech rush
While insurers like Uniqa and Helsana are focused on this delivery market, more drug breakthroughs could be coming as big pharma CVC back an array of biotech startups working on advancing the GLP-1 treatments.
Among large pharmaceutical companies, Lilly and Novo are trying to cement their lead with follow-up drugs, while competitors like Roche and Amgen are working on their own formulations. They are turning to startups to keep ahead of developments.
OrsoBio, a US biopharmaceutical startup, raised $67m in its series B round in September last year, with Eli Lilly participating. It is developing a class of therapeutics called mitochondrial protonophores, which it says can curb the loss of muscle mass experienced with GLP-1 drugs, if taken with them.
On January 9, Lilly took part in the $411m series A round for Verdiva Bio through its CVC arm Lilly Asia Ventures. Verdiva is a US startup that has the development and commercialisation rights to the Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sciwind’s drug portfolio, outside of China and South Korea. Early-development stage drugs in the pipeline include a once-weekly oral GLP-1 as well as those designed to be taken in combination.
Meanwhile, Novo took part in Antag Therapeutics’s $83m series A funding. Antag also aims to address an unwanted side effect of GLP-1 medication. Its financing will go towards developing an injectable drug that alleviates the gastrointestinal side effects of GLP-1 treatment.
Most recently, the GLP-1 developer Metsera announced it had filed for an IPO in the US. The biotech startup had only just had its series B funding round in November, where it raised $215m. This time the corporate interest came from tech companies SoftBank and Alphabet, through Vision Fund 2 and GV, respectively. Metsera has not said how much it aims to raise through its IPO, but capital must be welcome: it disclosed a net loss of over $156m from the first nine months of 2024 as part of the filing.
While the costs of developing these drugs are extreme, the potential upside is huge. For both biotech companies refining the technology and the clinics offering wraparound care, it is a market that looks set to expand.