Late last month, psychedelic venture studio Beckley Waves announced that it had acquired Nue Life, an at-home ketamine provider. (Nue Life was acquired by NueCo Holdings PBC, a newly formed portfolio company of Beckley Waves.)
Here, we speak to former employees and take a closer look at Nue Life’s trajectory from the highs of a $23m Series A through to reports of bankruptcy. We then talk to Beckley Waves’ Dan Love about the group’s plans to breathe new life into the company.
Origins
Nue Life was founded by “longtime Miami entrepreneurs” Juan Pablo Cappello and Demian Bellumio. In 2021 the pair raised a $3.3m seed round and acquired My Ketamine Home, an established at-home ketamine provider founded in 2018. They decided to continue operating My Ketamine Home as its own brand under the new operational structure.
Coverage of the company’s fundraising rounds (and its own statements) was often steeped in techie rhetoric, with mentions of a “graph database-driven app”, “proprietary algorithms”, and a “data-led, ‘quantified self’ approach.”
“While [we are] going to be legally compliant, [we will] leverage as many emerging technologies as possible”, Cappello told Miami Herald in 2021.
It appeared, then, that the founders planned to bring the growth mentality of the tech world to another booming field: psychedelics.
Back in 2021, the psychedelics market was arguably at its frothiest, with investment in the field reaching a crescendo to which it has not yet returned. All this to say, Cappello and Bellumio weren’t alone in the rush to raise funds based on ambitious plans to scale psychedelic-related offerings, in this case ketamine treatments.
In bypassing in-person appointments and administrations, at-home ketamine providers sought to overcome the barriers limiting the reach of brick-and-mortar ketamine clinics, potentially enabling them to access a much broader audience with lower-cost (and, ideally, higher-margin) offerings (…)
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