Artificial intelligence-based health, fitness and weight-loss startup Healthify has merged with New York-based dietitian-reimbursement platform Berry Street in an all-stock deal, according to a top executive, effectively making it a US company, with the India business now a subsidiary.
“We've been trying to scale the US mountain for about 18 months now, and we realized that the biggest hurdle was insurance, i.e., using insurance to reimburse a dietitian's time,” Tushar Vashisht, founder of Healthify, said in an interview with Mint. “We realized that while Berry Street has an AI gap, we have an insurance gap, hence the merger.”
Vashisht declined to comment on specific contours of the deal.
In the US, the company will move its direct-to-consumer business into the Berry Street, tying it to the consumers' insurance network. Vashisht will serve as co-chief executive officer and CEO, international, of the merged entity.
Investors in Healthify will continue in the merged entity, according to Vashisht. Venture capital firms on the startup's cap table include Chiratae Ventures, Leapfrog Investments, Blume Ventures, Claypond Capital and Khosla Ventures.
The merger comes at a time when health and wellness, especially weight-loss, have exploded, largely due to the commercial success and commoditization of Ozempic and Wegovy, drugs that help regulate blood sugar and appetite. Globally, the market for these drugs is expected to reach $95 billion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs.
B(US)siness as usual
Healthify's standalone US consumer operations have ceased. The only exception is the NRI segment, which Berry Street does not serve and will continue to use the Healthify app. Berry Street now gets access to the entire budget for expanding the Healthify business in the US.
“We will collapse all the marketing budget that we had for the United States to Berry Street,” said Vashisht. “We're dedicating a lot of our resources to the US expansion portfolio. Almost half our engineering team has been reallocated for the US and international markets.”
The merged entity may provide both investors and the founders some visibility into the future. A public offering in the US is on the cards, though still at least 24 months away, Vashisht said.
“Can we have other rounds that will end up giving some early investors an exit? That's very doable,” he said.
Given the merger, the listing of the Indian business has now become unlikely, though not completely ruled out just yet.
For Healthify, the shift frees Vashisht from day-to-day commercial responsibility in the US, which now sits with Noah Kotlove, founder and CEO of Berry Street. Vashisht's mandate narrows to AI development and international expansion into West Asia, Western Europe and Australia — markets he described as large cash-pay weight-loss opportunities that don't depend on insurance infrastructure.
Renewed India focus
Back home, Healthify plans to deepen its presence in the country and is preparing to enter new business verticals.
Business-to-business, through partnerships with healthcare-adjacent players such as pharma companies and insurance providers is a key area of focus. Healthify tied up with Novo Nordisk in December to roll out patient support programmes for those on the Wegovy drug.
The focus on India comes when weight loss and preventive health have become key areas of investor interest. The weight management market size in India was estimated at $27.4 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $56.7 billion by 2034, according to research from IMARC Group.
According to National Family Health Survey 5, conducted between 2019-2021, prevalence of obesity increased by 91% among women, and a 1.4x jump for men, compared to data from NFHS 3 (conducted between 2005-06). The NFHS 5 found that the obesity was prevalent in 24% of women and 23% of men. That percentage is likely to have grown in the last few years. Add in growing sedentary lifestyles, rising stress levels and changing diets- incidence of obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle diseases are on the rise.
As a result, investors have begun to focus on preventive business models, rather than reactive ones. "Recent deals such as USV’s acquisition of Wellbeing Nutrition, Sun Pharma’s acquisition of Innovcare and HUL’s acquisition of Oziva are cases in point. Indian CDMOs are also seeing increased activity as upcoming patent expiries create opportunities in GLP-1, peptides and biosimilars," said Shakun Kohli, partner at Deloitte India.
The other strategy the company is discussing is an offline-to-online physical centre strategy.
“It's always something I've been tentative about. But that tentativeness is becoming more real because now we have access to capital and the market is deeper and richer. Spend is going up in this space,” said Vashisht.