Perfood, the German digital therapeutic startup, has received 5 million Euro in its Series A funding round. Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund led the round and is joined by German family office UV-Cap and Verve Ventures.

The funds will be used for launching Perfood’s first prescription therapeutic sinCephalea for the treatment of migraine and to prepare the expansion of the technology into other indications. This includes conductions of clinical studies to advance its pipeline of digital therapeutics products.

With products such as sinCephalea, Perfood transfers state-of-the-art science into digital health applications for the treatment of various diseases. Scientific studies over the past few years have shown that glycemic reactions are fully individual. It has been a well-known fact that the glucose metabolism plays a major role in the development of diseases such as migraine, diabetes, heart attack, stroke and cancer. Since 2017, the medical team at Perfood has been developing digital therapy programs based on personalized, blood sugar-stabilizing nutrition. The personalized nutrition intervention is enhanced with targeted behavioral modulation, such as features for adherence management and patient education. For that, Perfood tracks nutrition, activity, symptoms and medication as well as glycemic responses for a limited period of two weeks, followed by a digital patient support program.

With patent-pending NutrilyticsTM, Perfood has developed the leading technology for personalized stable-glycemic diet interventions. The technology allows to precisely interpret the glycemic response to food, physical activity, medication, sleep and symptoms of illness. NutrilyticsTM consists of a set of algorithms based on artificial intelligence. The algorithms have been trained with Perfood’s unique data set with more than 6.5 million metabolic data points, consisting of glycemic reactions, intestinal microbiome and lifestyle factors. The data stack is also used by Perfood as a platform for deep phenotyping and precision medicine.

Dr. Oliver Reuss, Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund explains: “There are numerous diseases related to blood-glucose metabolism. Perfood has developed a unique technology to address the underlying causes. This technology has the potential to perfectly complement the current standard treatments of various prevalent diseases, such as metabolic or immune diseases.”

“With Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, UV-Cap and Verve Ventures, Perfood has an outstanding setup to bring sinCephalea onto the market not only in Germany but also internationally”, says Dominik Burziwoda, founder and CEO of Perfood GmbH. Dr. Torsten Schröder, Chief Medical Officer Perfood, adds: “We are very pleased to have such excellent partners on board who combine first-class know-how from medicine and high-tech. Together we can offer a digital therapy solution as an innovative treatment option for millions of migraine patients.”

Michael Lütolf, Investment Manager at Verve Ventures, says: “Digital therapeutics are currently one of the strongest growth drivers in the health care market. With Perfood, we are adding a pioneer in this segment to our portfolio that suits our strategy perfectly.”

For more background, read our interview with Prof. Christian Sina, one of Perfood’s co-founders and founding director of the Institute for Nutritional Medicine at the University Medical Center Schleswig Holstein.