Speaker Spotlight: Juan Pablo Capello, CEO & Co-Founder of Nue Life
Nue Life Q&A
Juan Pablo Capello, CEO and Co-Founder of Nue Life
Interviewed by Erin Roche
What is Nue Life Health?
Nue Life Health is a next-gen mental wellness company that believes in the power of psychedelics to catalyze lasting change. At Nue Life we have a big, beautiful goal and are doing the work by leveraging a data-centric approach. We launched in 2021 with the goal of helping 1 million people address the root cause of their depression, anxiety and PTSD— as a way to address the mental health crisis coming out of COVID.
In the first 12 months, Nue Life safely treated nearly 5,000 patients and facilitated over 35,000 at-home ketamine experiences measuring all outcomes while focusing on patient safety, integration and after-care. Nue Life reached $1M+ per month in less than a year, maintained a 60%+ gross margin, and successfully launched in 9 states.
What is your background and why did you start Nue Life?
My dad used to say, “the best ideas are the ideas that help people.” I have always been fascinated by how we can leverage technology to improve the lives of ordinary people. I built the first online bank with some friends in Latin America. We focused the bank on inclusion and accessibility to help lower middle income consumers have a more human experience at the bank. We sold it to Banco Santander for a bit over $700 million. What I see in the area of mental health is a similar opportunity that I saw 20+ years ago in Fin-tech and online banking which is a huge problem, suboptimal solutions and emerging technologies that could really drive a paradigm shift.
It is obvious that we are in the midst of a mental health crisis. One out of five women over 40 takes an antidepressant any given day, we have a million veterans on disability for PTSD and treatment resistant depression, and rates of teen depression have doubled in the past 6 years. SSRI’s and talk therapy don’t work for many people and when they do work, it’s expensive and in the case of SSRIs, they may limit the lows, but SSRIs also limits people’s ability to feel joy. Most people don’t want to live in a “grey” zone.
Today there are emerging technologies around artificial intelligence and personalized medicine as well as the emerging science around psychedelics that can really drive a paradigm shift in how mental health solutions are delivered – a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do a tremendous amount of good while generating extremely favorable returns for investors. So for us the opportunity around behavioral health reflects a perfect balance or union of mission and margin.
What is unique Nue Life’s approach in this space?
Every other company in the space is basically trying to substitute daily antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds or just daily not-feeling-well for monthly or quarterly ketamine treatments. Which to be honest is not a bad trade. But at Nue Life Health we are trying to do something much more profound. We are NOT putting our patients on “maintenance” monthly or quarterly ketamine with daily antidepressants. Instead we are helping people heal the root cause of their suffering and disease, and the way we do that is to offer ketamine therapy along with AI-assisted integration and aftercare.
We are the only company in the space that is monitoring and supporting patients, well after the ketamine experiences. Our business model is to help patients on their journey of deep healing. The business models of the other companies leveraging ketamine is to simply serve up more ketamine. We have a very differentiated approach. And what allows us to do that, is we come to this as real tech entrepreneurs. And this is a new approach to mental wellbeing that we are offering to the world. We understand how to leverage analytics and big data to build smarter companies. That’s just a very different approach to anyone else in this space.
How would you describe the Nue Life team?
We have a remarkably run team and we recently published Nue Life’s Impact Report, which communicates its values and commitment to ethical psychedelic treatment—the whole founding team are people of color and women, we are public benefits corporation and we are committed to sharing our data to improve the standard of care for all patients.
On the tech side our co-founder and COO Demian Bellumio ran the knowledge graph group at Accenture, he also was the head of the big data and AI group at Neoris, another large consulting firm. On the medical side we have three medical directors who have incredible experience in the space. Dr. Zayn Hassan was running a company called My Ketamine Home which we acquired. We have Dr. Ben
Medrano who was Chief Medical Officer at Field Trip, and we have Dr. Lynn-Marie Morski, the founder of the Psychedelic Medical Association (PMA). Nue Life’s commitment to accessibility and to elevating the standard of care is what has attracted such amazing talent.
What else do you want investors to know about Nue Life?
We have treated over 7,500 patients and collected the data on the 50,000+ ketamine experiences we have facilitated. Our results are incredible. We validated that two thirds of our treatment resistant patients have a 50% reduction of symptoms (which means most of those patients are no longer diagnosed with depression, anxiety or PTSD). These results, our first scientific paper just published in the
current issue of Frontiers of Psychology, are almost incredible as they focus on some of the toughest patients to treat—those who SSRIs and other existing pharmaceuticals don’t work for.
However, the mental health journey is similar to physical health: the journey is never over. It’s not as if we wake up one day, and we’re fit. Life happens, we evolve. Our recurring revenue model is to support our patients through technology, tele-health, tele-therapy, integration sessions and AI-assisted therapies, whether it’s medication or breath-work. It’s all about supporting the patient in their journey of health,
and the patient pays us for it, on a monthly basis as opposed to just coming back to us to quote unquote ‘feel better’, and then going back to the mean, to how they felt before. Our recurring revenue model is about helping patients STAY well, rather than helping patients get back to feeling well. We’re trying to help patients avoid, essentially, a yo-yo diet with their mental wellbeing. We’re trying to help patients
just stay in that elevated mental state.
Are you looking at any other alternative treatments besides ketamine in the future? Or are you kind of married to ketamine?
We’re evidence based, so we’re interested in working with MDMA and psilocybin in the future and as they become legal. And there are other modalities, whether it's trans-cranial stimulation or red light therapy, we define ourselves as the next generation mental wellness company. And we leverage emerging digital and medicinal technologies to drive better patient outcomes. So we’re very agnostic as
to the tools that we use. The main thing is that they need to be evidence based, so we’re really focused on data and analytics and we are using that approach to really inform how we grow the company.
Where do we go to learn more about Nue Life Health?
If anyone want to try our treatment, they can reach out to our VIP coordinator, Miku Khezri at miku@nue.life. All of your readers will receive a discount on our therapies. If anyone is interested in learning more about the company and what we are building with an eye towards
investing, please have them reach out to noa@kahnerglobal.com. We really appreciate you and your readers being on a healing journey.
The Cannabis & Psychedelics Investment Summit Series showcases the best and brightest cannabis and psychedelic entrepreneurs and is the premiere summit for institutional investors, family offices, and ultra high net worth investors. Request an invitation to attend the upcoming summit taking place Feburary 27, 2023 in Miami, FL at www.kahnerglobal.com. Please email us at info@kahnerglobal.com for speaking and sponsorship opportunities.
