A new report from venture capital and corporate innovation platform Plug and Play mapped more than 30 startups working across inflammaging, metabolic health, the gut-brain axis and the gut-skin axis, finding a growing mix of therapeutics, diagnostics, supplements and data-driven platforms.
According to Arthur Jamon, VC analyst at Plug and Play, the recent investment interest reflects a better understanding of how the microbiome connects to different aspects of health.
“It all comes down to understanding,” he told NutraIngredients. “While the microbiome itself hasn’t changed, how much we understand it has.”
Research connecting the microbiome to inflammation, metabolism, cognition and skin health has helped drive consumer interest and encouraged startups to explore new products and business models, he added.
Data changes the value proposition
While probiotics remain a major commercial application of microbiome science, Plug and Play’s analysis identified growing activity around diagnostics, AI-powered personalization and platforms that can support multiple interventions.
This has also changed what some corporate partners are looking for from startups.
“When a corporation buys a dataset, what they’re really getting is something that could be built into a whole family of future offers,” Jamon said.
“That changes what ‘the product’ is. It doesn’t have to be a supplement; it can be a service, a diagnostic, a data platform,” he added.
Among the nutrition-focused companies in the report, Viome uses RNA sequencing to generate personalized nutrition and supplement recommendations, while Myota combines patented prebiotic fiber blends with a B2B ingredients business.
Pendulum has focused on clinically studied probiotic strains for metabolic health, a segment Plug and Play identified as one of the more mature areas of microbiome innovation.
Jamon added that he expects data-driven evidence to become a more important differentiator for supplement and ingredient companies entering the longevity space.
For example, he illustrated, proprietary longitudinal datasets can help identify responses to interventions, while clinical trials are needed to validate those findings, and lower sequencing costs and AI tools that can analyze microbiome, metabolite and biomarker data together are making that process more accessible.
“The lesson is to build evidence into the product from day one, rather than bolting it on later,” Jamon said.
“What remains true today is that proof still comes from well-designed trials and from data that makes them smarter,” he added.
Gut-skin sees growing interest
Plug and Play’s analysis found that startups rarely fit neatly within one of the four biological areas it mapped, with many targeting mechanisms that overlap inflammation, metabolism, brain health and skin health.
Of those areas, gut-skin has seen particularly strong recent activity, according to Jamon.
The report highlighted Parallel Health, which combines microbiome diagnostics, AI, phage-based serums and teledermatology, and Sequential, which moved from consumer skin testing toward a B2B model serving cosmetics and pharmaceutical companies.
Jamon said the activity reflects a shift beyond traditional beauty positioning toward greater clinical interest in the gut-skin axis.
The report also pointed to increased corporate investment in the area, including L’Oréal’s 2023 acquisition of Danish microbiome research company Lactobio and its research partnership with Institut Pasteur to investigate microbial and immune interactions in skin aging.
Higher bar for longevity claims
As longevity becomes more prominent across the nutrition industry, Jamon expects companies to face greater pressure to substantiate the connection between an intervention and a healthy aging outcome.
That requires evidence that the biomarker being measured is meaningful as well as evidence showing that a particular intervention can change it, he explained.
“The strongest players run separate studies showing that a specific intervention shifts that marker in the right direction, and only make a recommendation once both pieces are in place,” he said. “That’s a much higher bar than pointing to one study.”
The next step could be applying those datasets to personalization at scale.
Rather than simply matching consumers with products, Jamon sees potential in using individual data to assess different interventions and predict responses before making recommendations.
“That could be the real path to bringing clinical-level precision to a general population,” he said.
The approach could ultimately extend beyond microbiome-based products, he added, as nutrition and preventive health companies increasingly use individual data to determine which interventions are most relevant to different consumers.
