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Ketamine treatment app draws backing of Mana, Joakim Noah, Miami tech vets 

Miami Herald - 11/8/2021

Moishe Mana, Alan Faena and former NBA star Joakim Noah have joined some of the biggest names in Miami tech to invest in Nue Life Health, Inc., a psychedelics-assisted telemedicine group focused on mental health that is launching Monday from two longtime local innovation players.

At the center of Nue Life’s pitch is ketamine, a long-taboo drug that is now being reevaluated by mental health professionals and the Food and Drug Administration alike for its ability to treat a host of mental health conditions.

Monday, Nue Life announced its wrap-around mental health services app is going live.

“It will be their daily companion, from medical onboarding to telehealth,” said Nue Life co-founder and CTO Demian Bellumio.

Nue Life announced it had raised $6 million on the back of its acquisition earlier this year of My Ketamine Home, an at-home mental health therapy service. Bellumio said that in the past six months, revenues for the group have grown 5x, with 20,000 treatments administered to 2,000 patients. (In 2019, the FDA approved a nasal spray ketamine treatment that can be delivered to a patient’s home.) Nue Life is also now registered as a B-corp — a new, semi-official status that includes audits of its social and environmental performance.

“We are taking a holistic approach to mental health, and will monitor the well-being of patients, giving them recommendations as needed,” Bellumio said.

The ketamine treatment itself involves the patient lying on a couch or bed with a spotter — a relative, friend, or colleague — and entering what Bellumio calls a “lucid dream state.” After about six treatments, the therapy has been shown to take people out of deep depressions.

Nue Life, which was co-founded by longtime local tech player Juan Pablo Capello, is Miami tech’s response to a new wave of psychedelic-assisted treatment companies — a space of increasing interest to venture capital. Leading the charge is Peter Thiel, who has invested in two separate companies in the space. Jack Abraham, executive director of the Thiel Fellowship program as well as the founder of Atomic venture studio and now a Miami resident, has been announced as one of Nue Life’s investors. Abraham could not immediately be reached for comment.

Jon Oringer, founder of Shutterstock and another recent Miami-area transplant, is also doubling down on an earlier investment in the company. Oringer said in an interview that psychedelics could represent a breakthrough for a field of medicine that has become too reliant on drugs like selective seratoninc reuptake inhibitors, better knon as SSRIs, like Prozac and Lexapro.

“What I saw with Nue Life: You have really successful people who have started companies, and are figuring out a way to bring this to a market, a population that should have more access to it— people on these antidepressasnts should have more options,” Oringer said. “There’s still a lot more research. to be done, and it’s still early, but you have these amazing companies now working in this area that can solve a big problem.”

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