Vanessa
Rissetto

Vanessa Rissetto runs Culina Health, a virtual nutrition-care company she co-founded in 2020 with fellow registered dietitian Tamar Samuels. Today it is a network of about 90 dietitians that has seen more than 10,000 patients and takes insurance.

The premise is simple enough to fit on a business card and stubborn enough to have taken decades to build a company around: nutrition care should be delivered by registered dietitians, covered by insurance, and available to people who do not usually get referred to one. Rissetto has said the plainest version of it. Individuals seeking nutrition care, she argues, should be met where they are, not expected to fit a mold.

What makes that more than a slogan is who is saying it. Rissetto spent five years as a senior dietitian at Mount Sinai Hospital and then directed the dietetic internship program at New York University, where she trained early-career clinicians. Some of the people she mentored there now work for her. The company did not hire consultants to design its clinical model; the founder ran the internship.

In December 2024, Culina Health raised a $7.9 million Series A led by Healthworx, the venture arm of the insurer CareFirst. That is a detail worth sitting with. An insurance company's investment vehicle led a round in a company whose entire pitch is that nutrition counseling should be a covered benefit. The buyer of the outcome helped fund the machine that produces it. Rissetto said the money would go toward AI tools to lighten clinicians' load and toward senior hires.

She is also, on any given week, the dietitian you might see explaining something about food on the Today Show, or quoted in Vogue, The New York Times, or Bon Appetit. She still sees patients. The CEO who closes the funding round and the clinician in the video call are the same person, which is unusual enough in health tech to be worth noticing.

A 95 patient Net Promoter Score is the kind of number that makes people who run healthcare businesses raise an eyebrow, because it is very hard to earn and easy to claim. Culina Health reports it alongside thousands of referring physicians, which is the metric that actually matters: doctors sending their patients to you is a vote you cannot buy.

The Series A was led by Healthworx, with the round bringing total funding above $20 million. Rissetto described the fundraising itself as exhilarating, exhausting, and validating - three words that, in order, describe most founding stories that end in a term sheet.

Rissetto's credentials do not read like a straight line. There is a bachelor's degree in history from Fordham and a master's in marketing from NYU - neither of which certifies anyone to write a meal plan. The clinical training came later and on purpose.

That marketing degree is easy to skip past and worth pausing on. A nutrition company lives or dies on whether people trust it, book it, and come back. A founder who studied marketing and then became the clinician is a rare combination in a sector that usually splits those jobs across two very different hires.

The two-practices origin is the other tell. Rissetto and Samuels were each already doing the work, separately, at small scale. The company was less a leap into the unknown than a decision that they would be louder together.