Name: Sami Inkenin, Virta Health
Uploaded: 2025-07-25T17:00:00.000Z

More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: MedTech Unplugged, the Future of AI in Healthcare & Life Sciences

Sami Inkenin

CEO

Virta Health

Gemma Allen

Host, theCUBE + NYSE Wired

theCUBE

Info

Sami Inkenin, Virta Health

Sami Inkenin

CEO Virta Health

Gemma Allen

Host, theCUBE + NYSE Wired theCUBE

HOST

>> Palo Alto Studio Connection, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, the host of The Cube here with Gabe Elabe, my co-host. Welcome back to The Cube Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with NYSE Wired, MedTech Unplugged. And one thing we know is that healthcare has spent decades managing chronic disease. My next guest is betting we should be reversing it. And that turns the medical question into a massive business question. If chronic disease can be reversed, what happens to the trillion-dollar system built around managing it? Joining me now is Sami Inkinen, Virta co-founder and CEO. Welcome, Sami.

>> Well, Gemma, thank you so much for having me here.

>> So, Sami, I want to get into Virta. Lots to unpack. But first, I want to talk a little bit about you and your background, because I think it's also part of your founder story as it relates to this company. But you also co-founded Trulioo, a company we all know well, acquired by Zillow, listed here at the NYSE. Give us the background here. What made you decide, you know what, I'm sick of disrupting property, I'm going to disrupt healthcare instead?

>> Yeah, well, I guess I'm pretty unlikely healthcare entrepreneur, born and raised in Finland, physicist by training, started my career in a nuclear power plant actually in Finland as a physicist and then came to America 2003. And as you mentioned, I co-founded company called Trulia, which went public 2012, and, uh, and then is now part of the Zillow Group. But throughout those years, I was a high-performing endurance athlete, and if you had asked me then, hey, let's go and solve metabolic disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, I would have literally rolled my eyes and said impossible, impossible. Uh, this is really just a matter of people knowing what they should do, which is to say Eat less, exercise more, but people just don't do that. But I had to personally eat a lot of humble pie because it turns out that despite being an endurance athlete, doing a lot of triathlons, I even won triathlon world championships in my age group. Soon after that, and this was around the time Truly I went public, I discovered that I was pre-diabetic, pre-diabetic. And it did not make any sense to me. And kind of through my own journey, I started talking to scientists and asking, what is going on here? How can someone who's lean, exercising a lot, being metabolically unhealthy? And then through all that work and discovery, I found out that actually there is a way to nutritionally treat metabolic disease, not just prediabetes, but even people with late-stage type 2 diabetes, that you could reverse that condition with proper support and individualized nutrition. And here we are about 12 years later, scaling Virta.

>> Wow. Well, one thing we know for sure is the world of 2014 as it related to metabolic health in the public domain and the narrative around it and the world of 2026, a lot happened in a short space, specifically with what you can only describe as like the explosion of GLP-1s, right? I live in Brooklyn. I know women who are not pre-diabetic and not even overweight and take GLP-1s for reasons just of, I guess, aesthetic. They are everywhere. Talk about what it has meant for Virta and the product roadmap. Like, do you find that people are more educated on the topic of metabolic health and what has it done to your business model, Sami?

>> Yeah, well, let's quickly just take a step back. When we talk about metabolic diseases, chronic metabolic diseases, that means type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, kidney disease, and many other conditions. And this is what I call the health epidemic of our generation. In America alone, close to $4 trillion out of the $5 trillion healthcare spend goes into treating chronic metabolic diseases. And historically, we've thought these conditions can only be managed. But what we've now shown at Virta is that you can actually reverse or prevent essentially all of these chronic metabolic disease conditions that again cost about $4 trillion a year. So it is not a surprise that there's also a lot of pharmaceutical innovation to try to address these conditions too. So to specifically answer your question, These GLP-1 drugs are a very, very useful tool in a toolkit in addressing chronic metabolic disease, and they help people to change how much they eat. But fundamentally, unless you also change what you eat, you are not fixing the underlying metabolic health condition. So what has happened to our business as the prevalence and use of GLP-1s has rapidly gone up is the plan sponsors, the employers and health plans have realized that, oh my God, we have a now new tool, can be very effective. This is the GLP-1 drugs, but they are extremely expensive as, as well. How do we effectively invest potentially into these drugs but minimize waste, maximize outcomes and make most out of it? And that has been a huge, huge tailwind for us at Verra. To say, hey, we can help you. We can help make most out of the use of these drugs. But again, if your appetite goes down, you eat less, you still need the help of what you eat. And that's really the Virta expertise. We'll help you change and individualize your nutrition and therefore maximize outcomes and minimize total healthcare costs.

>> So talk us through the Virta experience. Like, is it essentially a virtual metabolic metabolic clinic meets a software play? Like, give us— bring it to life for us. What would it feel like to be a client of Virta? Talk us through how the tech and the education, I guess, converge.

>> Yeah, absolutely. And first, to just highlight, our business clients are employers, self-insured employers, and health plans, and government entities, state entities, Now we work with nearly 1,000 clients, businesses who cover the Virta treatment. And the reason they cover it is we can rapidly save healthcare costs and they pay less for our treatment than what we save for them. So it makes total economic sense for these clients and payers to cover the Virta treatment. And then individual patients, whether they are employees of these self-insured employers or health plan members get free access to Virta. And what our patients get, we assign a full-time medical doctor who's one of our employees to each of the patients, a health coach, and then all the treatment and interaction happens virtually. And our main therapy, as I mentioned earlier, is individualized nutrition. So we individualize the treatment so that we can reverse your metabolic disease. And how we do that is exclusively through lifestyle change. So we don't send you any food, but we tell you how to adjust your eating. And that's all individualized. So we measure biomarkers remotely and see how your body responds to our therapy. And then on a daily basis, adjust how you can adjust your eating. And of course, our medical doctors also, if there's a need for medications, we can prescribe medications so we can adjust those. And optimize the use of that. But the primary therapy that we have is nutrition. And the ultimate goal is to make you sustainably healthy, reverse your metabolic disease, and where appropriate, then obviously get you fully off of medications, including insulin. We've been able to show that we can reverse type 2 diabetes, get patients off of insulin. If you're losing weight, most people actually don't wanna stay on any weight loss medication for the rest of their lives. Carefully help you to get off of the medications and then use nutrition to sustain those outcomes. So you could think of us very intense individualized support on a day-to-day basis to help you make the right lifestyle changes to achieve the outcomes that we know are possible.

>> So if I'm understanding this correctly, an employer signs up to this plan for its employee who becomes your patient. They have an app, they have connected devices. I'm sure there's some level of connected health here. You collect data, you have a clinical team who then work with you and adjust your treatment as you progress, correct?

>> Precisely.

>> So in that world, talk me through the tech evolution that you're seeing happening and how it's being built into your own product roadmap. We talk a lot about the world of AI. There has been a huge amount of promise that AI can solve for all sorts of health challenges, right? Cancer, we hope to God, is one. But talk me through how you're using it in your product stack and your roadmap. Bring the tech part of your business to life for us a little.

>> Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, I often say that I'm a physicist, nuclear physicist by training, but using nutrition as a therapy is even harder than nuclear physics. Why is that the case? Well, because We all eat different food. Our lives are different. Our bodies respond differently. Some of us may be truck drivers who only have access to fast food restaurants. Some might— some of us might shop in a nice grocery store and cook at home, and some of us have a spouse cooking. So using nutrition as a therapy, unlike, say, a pharmaceutical, is many orders of magnitude harder to individualize and make work. So guess what? That's a perfect software problem because with software we can individualize to infinite number of individuals how the therapy should be customized each day. So without— so the baseline for us is that without software, without technology, Virta would not be possible. And we had to completely change the way care is delivered. So what we call it, the Virta way of delivering care is continuous, remote care, which is very different from the traditional episodic care where you go and see your doctor maybe 2, 3 times a year. Instead, we deliver care on a 24/7 basis. So kind of the baseline is without technology, without software, this would not be possible. Now, of course, over the last couple of years, the AI capabilities have rapidly and exponentially improved. We started building machine learning models 2017. To better understand our patients, predict when they may have an issue so that our coaches and providers could respond proactively. And now with these new AI tools, we've been able to move care to be much more synchronous. So you can imagine if you have an issue and you message your health coach, sure, they might be able to get back to you pretty quickly. That might be 2 minutes, sometimes an hour, sometimes 2 hours, but that's pretty asynchronous. Now with AI, we can respond. This is just one example. We're gonna respond to our patients essentially in real time. And then we've been able to build tools using AI where you can take pictures of your food and in real time, whether you're eating at home and you're in a restaurant, we can give you suggestions how you might adjust your meal, what you should order to optimally improve your metabolic health. I think the possibilities are limitless to improve our patient experience and patient outcomes, which is always, the most important thing for us.

>> So, Sami, we track tech and its progression and developments very closely here, and last week we heard a lot about Claude Health, right, and the push that's happening in the world of LLMs into the healthcare space generally. I want to ask you about some of the conversations that are happening around that though, from the perspective of patient concern, right? Folks are concerned about things like data retention, personal information, data management. Do you also face those similar types of questions, you know, when you were selling into large enterprises? And, and what's your response to this world of AI being so powerful but also like very intrusive, and ensuring that we have the balance of, you know, brilliant outcomes for individuals but, you know, at a, at a balanced level?

>> Well, first of all, We are healthcare company and provider as well. So we employ medical doctors who deliver care. So we are very, very careful with patient data, patient outcomes, patient safety. I think there was unnamed tech CEO some decade ago said, "Move fast and break things." But guess what? That in healthcare, bad things will happen. So we are very, very careful and our sort of north star is always, patient outcomes, patient safety, and taking good care of our patients and their data. So that's kind of our North Star always. That said, I think the capabilities of artificial intelligence today is super exciting. And we are sort of only scratching the surface in what can be done. And the term that we use internally in using AI in our patient care is, yes, there are features that can be fully automated. And as I mentioned earlier, with AI, we can provide essentially real-time support to our patients. But what I don't really believe in is artificial empathy. I don't believe in artificial empathy. So the role of our health coaches treating our patients, as well as our physicians, especially this empathy part, to be able to connect and support our patients when what I call life happens, whether that's you know, sickness in a family or somebody loses a job, that's when a lifestyle treatment— usually people are challenged and that's where the empathy really comes to play.

>> Because you quoted a prolific CEO there, I'm also going to quote one back to you and ask you a little bit about the economics of this, right? Another infamous person once said healthcare execs love to say they want prevention, but the money is often in the treatment. Talk to me about what you're seeing from the perspective of cost outcomes for these enterprises and these states and these government entities you're working with. Like, give me the numbers here.

>> Yes. Well, I like to say that the love language of American capitalism is money. And it turns out that in our for-profit healthcare, it is the same thing. So the nice thing is that what we deliver is metabolic disease reversal. And it turns out that unlike many other things in healthcare, when you reverse a costly conditions like type 2 diabetes, it also saves money. So when we talk to Fortune 1000 employers, self-insured employers, or health plans, it's never a conversation of, oh, this is expensive, and now there's a trade-off between cost and patient outcomes. No, instead it's a win-win. We come in and say, hey, we can reverse a very expensive chronic metabolic condition, again, like type 2 diabetes, and that saves you a lot of money to the tune of about $500, $600 per patient per month. So we are talking about $6,000, $7,000 per year, and Virta fees are a fraction of that. So value proposition to these payers is, guess what? You make money and you make your employees and health plan members healthier. What is there not to like? You improve someone's life. You save their life and you save money. Let's work together. And then on top of that, we also say we take 100% downside risk. So if Virta doesn't work, we don't deliver the quantified, quantifiable outcomes that we promised we will deliver. You pay nothing. It's a very disarming business model. And it's— I think it's pretty rare in healthcare. But I would hope that most of the healthcare would move towards this type of outcomes-based pricing where there is no trade-off between outcomes and cost savings.

>> You mentioned at the beginning this, you know, comparison between metabolic healthcare and nuclear science, right? One thing as a European— I know you're also European too, Sami— that I find absolutely fascinatingly difficult is the insurance system here in the US. And I sometimes think about that from the perspective of employers that pay these massive plans. What sorts of conversations are happening at that level? Like, how is that narrative and that industry evolving? What are you hearing from employers that perhaps you weren't hearing 5, 10 years ago? And where do you think this employee benefits world is headed?

>> Well, first of all, I will say, having spoken with thousands of benefits leaders, who work at self-insured employers, it is a very, very tough job. It is a very, very tough job. Why? Well, one, you have to make complex healthcare coverage decisions for your employees. But secondly, and most importantly, healthcare costs in America just keep skyrocketing up. We're talking 8, 9, 10% year over year, like 8, 9, 10% year over year. That is sort of 2, 3, 4, 5 times our overall inflation rate. So it's a very, very tough job. And then we have new fantastic innovations like these GLP-1 drugs, chronic metabolic diseases and GLP-1 costs. Quite frankly, they are the top one or top two issue for every single self-insured employer today. And just as an example, about half, only half of self-insured employers cover GLP-1s for weight loss today. And some of the ones who covered last year are not covering next year. These are very difficult decisions. So what these large self-insured employers are looking for are solutions that both drive better health outcomes like Virta rapidly, but secondly, also quantifiable cost savings in a year or at most in 2 years. So that those are the 2 key words: better outcomes cost savings. And it's a very tough job as a benefits leader to balance those two things.

>> Well, it certainly needs to be quantifiable, that's for sure. So, Sami, last question to you. Virta, the company, the stage you're at, the scale— talk to us about, you know, where you're at from a commercial perspective and what's ahead.

>> Yeah, well, I would say we're just scratching the surface. So we just turned 11 years old as a company. The first 5, 6 years of our journey, we had Essentially no clients and little financials to show because we ran a 5-year prospective clinical trial to generate evidence to show that we can actually reverse type 2 diabetes and metabolic disease. And today we are about quarter billion dollar revenue run rate, just became profitable, growing quite fast, I should say very fast. So in a very nice place. But in terms of the scale of the problem and the total addressable market that we have that we're going after, which is scratching the surface. So all I can say is it's still day one for Virta.

>> Well, congrats on reaching profitability. And any company that has reversing chronic disease in its tagline certainly has my support. So, Sami, thank you so much for joining us on NYSE Wired.

>> Yeah, thank you so much, Gemma.

>> I'm Gemma Allen here at the Cube Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is MedTech Unplugged, one of our segments of NYSE Wired. Thanks for watching.