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- Fay’s nutrition revolution expands with a $50m Series B ⚡️
Fay’s nutrition revolution expands with a $50m Series B ⚡️
Plus: CEO Sammy Faycurry on the transformative impact of AI on dietetics...
CV Deep Dive
Today, we’re talking with Sammy Faycurry, CEO and Co-Founder of Fay.
Fay is an AI-powered platform that helps dietitians launch and scale their private practices. Founded by Sammy after experiencing firsthand the challenges his own mother and sister faced as dietitians, Fay has grown into one of the first AI-enabled vertical marketplaces addressing the systemic issues challenging our healthcare system today. Fay’s platform provides dietitians with an end-to-end solution, integrating insurance billing, client management, and AI-powered administrative tools to streamline operations and enhance client care.
Today, Fay supports nearly 3,000 dietitians and has scaled rapidly, surpassing $50 million in revenue. By leveraging AI to automate tedious back-office tasks—like meal planning, insurance claims, and client documentation—Fay is enabling dietitians to focus more on client care while making high-quality nutrition support more accessible. Last week, the company most recently announced a $50m Series B round led by Goldman Sachs, bringing its valuation to $500m.
In this conversation, Sammy shares how Fay got started, the transformative impact of AI on dietetics, and his vision for the future of personalized nutrition.
Let’s dive in ⚡️
Read time: 8 mins
Our Chat with Sammy 💬
Sammy, welcome to Cerebral Valley! First off, introduce yourself and give us a bit of background on you and Fay. What led you to co-found Fay?
Hey there! My name is Sammy Faycurry, and I'm the founder and CEO of Fay - a vertical AI business-in-a-box that helps dietitians start and grow their own private practice. We're one of the first vertical AI-enabled marketplaces.
The way it got started was, I was helping my mom and sister—both dietitians— before I went to HBS for business school. I noticed that while a lot of people were building for mental health therapists, no one was really doing anything for dietitians. So, I built the initial version of the platform for them, ended up dropping out, raised a seed round from GC, and partnered up to scale the company.
From there, we continued to really build the product and raised our Series A a year later, led by Forerunner. Now, we're doing well over $50 million in revenue, growing like crazy, and recently raised our Series B!
Every year, there’s been a massive unlock, and AI has been a huge paradigm shift—we’re fully bought in. It’s wild to go from nothing to where we are now. When I dropped out, we had about 30 dietitians on the platform; now we’re close to 3,000. It’s been a pretty insane journey.
Who are your users today? Who is finding the most value in what you're building at Fay?
Fay is a place where you can find a personal dietitian covered by your insurance. In a way, we’re actually building a three-sided marketplace that serves dietitians, clients and insurance companies, but our wedge and primary customer is really the dietitian. We’re building an AI-enabled software solution that empowers them to run their own private practice.
For dietitians, Fay comes out of the box already integrated with insurance companies, who are paying for the services. This is important because working with insurance companies is a huge hurdle and headache for independent dietitians. In a way, we’re providing a business-in-a-box solution for dietitians, kind of like how Toast does for small businesses, but the insurance companies are the enterprise customers that actually foot the bill. We partner with dietitians, but don’t charge them to use our platform.
Today, if you go to our website, as a client, you’d think you’re the only customer—that’s the third side of the marketplace. We make care accessible for clients through insurance coverage and access. Fay exists to help hundreds of millions of people live healthier, happier lives and we believe dietitians are best equipped to help people get there. That’s why our main entry point into the market is through empowering dietitians. The dietitian piece comes from my background, both my mom and sister are dietitians.
I’ve seen firsthand how they’ve transformed their clients lives and how squashed they’ve been by the healthcare system that exists today. That’s how we naturally found our way into this space.
Walk us through Fay’s product. What use-case should people experiment with first, and how easy is it for them to get started?
On the client side, it’s pretty simple. You go to our website, search for a dietitian—either in your area or virtually—enter your insurance information, and get a price estimate. Most people pay $0, but we provide an estimate so they have some confidence in their insurance coverage before booking.
From there, you find the dietitian that’s the best fit for you. Some people are dealing with PCOS or IBS, others are athletes training for marathons—everyone is at a different place in their journey. You match with the perfect dietitian for your needs and book an initial consultation.
After that, everyone’s journey is unique. A lot of people start out meeting weekly with their dietitian, setting goals based on where they are. It’s a really intimate relationship, having someone hold you accountable. This kind of personalized nutrition support used to be something only celebrities had—Kim Kardashian, Oprah—personal nutritionists. But we’re making that level of service accessible to everyone.
How have you been able to verticalize this very distributed workflow, into a platform that's simple and easy for dietitians to use?
We’re really proud of how we built the company.. Mark and I, as co-founders, really pride ourselves on solving real problems—looking at what the actual issues are and what exists in the market to address them.
When we looked at the challenges dietitians face, we started realizing, right in the middle of this AI paradigm shift, that AI was becoming unbelievably powerful. The core problem we found for dietitians—and really in healthcare more broadly—is that insurance companies will only pay for an hour-long appointment, maybe $100, but the prep work leading up to that appointment can take 6 and a half hours. If you're only getting paid $100, that means dietitians are effectively working below minimum wage.
A lot of healthcare workers, when you break it down by time, are putting in hours of unpaid work just to deliver high-quality care. With AI, we’ve brought the time required to deliver high quality care down to under 2 hours and are continuing to improve on it. Our platform has made it possible to actually deliver that high-quality care efficiently. We can go into the specifics of how, but the bottom line is that suddenly, $100 goes a lot further. Dietitians are happier, clients get better care, and everything—from front office to back office to the care itself—gets accelerated in ways like never before. It’s the craziest, most magical thing ever.
Which existing use-case for AI has impacted your progress the most at Fay? How are you measuring the impact that you’re creating for your customers?
We have so many but I’ll tell you about one huge unlock for us—meal plans.
Everyone who sees a dietitian wants a meal plan. But dietitians were expected to create these plans outside of appointment time, and it takes hours. It’s crazy. When we did time studies and watched them make these meal plans, my eyes were popping out of my skull. The amount of thought and care that goes into each one is just insane.
Then we built an AI meal planner that does all that work in under a minute. Like, 30 seconds—snap of the fingers—and the initial draft is done. It takes into account all of the client’s limitations and preferences. All the dietitian has to do is review it, make any edits, and put their stamp of approval. Now, you have a medically tailored meal plan with prescription-strength capabilities, approved by a real healthcare provider, in seconds instead of hours.
There are a number of stakeholders building in AI x healthcare. How have you navigated your customers’ excitement for (or resistance to) incorporating AI into their practices?
It’s interesting to see the reactions. We were so scared —like, absolutely horrified—when we were testing some of these things in the market. I think everyone had a bit of an existential moment around anything AI-related. We really pride ourselves on staying close to the voice of the customer, and we could feel a lot of anxiety. Anyone who’s deeply connected to their customers can naturally pick up on that kind of anxiety, just part of human nature.
We really felt it from the dietitian community and, to some extent, from clients as well—though less so from insurance companies. They leaned into it quickly and saw it as an opportunity, like a lot of businesses did.
But once we rolled out these features, it has been night and day in terms of adoption and the love the dietitian community now has for AI. We’ve been really thoughtful in the features we build and the order we build them to make sure we are actually solving a problem and making dietitians’ lives easier. Just last month, AI became the hottest topic—everyone’s excited about it. It’s even on the front cover of local industry magazines in the dietitian community, which is something we never would have expected to see this year.
We thought that was going to take at least two or three years to happen. But because we’re the largest network of dietitians and the fastest-growing one in the country, a lot of that has been, frankly, us shaping the future.
What’s one feature of Fay’s current platform that you’re extremely proud of?
I’ll be honest - we took inspiration—with great honor—from a few features from Harvey AI, which is a legal business-in-a-box for law firms. They’ve done really impressive work on structuring unstructured data.
For us, dietitians review a lot of labs. Clients can now upload their labs onto Fay, and on the back end, we have an amazing partnership with Anthropic that analyzes and structures that data. So every time a dietitian opens labs, everything is neatly organized, easy to track over time—what used to take a ton of time to unravel is now instantly clean and structured.
The dietitians have had no reaction because I don’t think there is an understanding that AI is even involved. Just pure love for the feature.
I’ll give you another one—client recaps. This one is so elegant. Dietitians have so many clients, right? One of the biggest challenges is making sure every client feels valued, respected, and understood as an individual. It’s incredibly embarrassing for a healthcare provider to show up and not remember something important a client shared—imagine asking how the cake was at a client’s party only to learn you mixed up clients.
Now, with AI-powered client recaps, dietitians get a summary of who the client is, their personal struggles, what was discussed in the last session, their financial situation—so they’re not recommending things out of budget—their sensitivities, allergies, and even religious dietary preferences, like making sure recommendations are kosher.
It takes client care to an entirely new level, elevating the standard of service in a way that many dietitians didn’t even realize was AI-driven. We put a little feedback collection system in place, and it’s been overwhelmingly positive—98% thumbs-up.
Most of the AI features we launch are extremely well received. So when you ask how people are reacting, sometimes there hasn’t even been a reaction—it’s just business as usual.
2025 is slated as the “Year of the Agent”. How do autonomous agents factor into your product vision for Fay?
I’d say there are two components to this. First, there are some things already happening today on our platform—research being done, journeys being created, and workflows around claims auditing. With AI and agent-like systems, entire workflows are being replaced with really elegant software design and automation. I wouldn’t say it’s fully agent-based in the way people talk about it today, but there are definitely processes that have replaced jobs.
For example, on the billing side, many workflows have been almost completely automated. Pricing estimation and claims processing—these were once entire jobs, and at least within Fay, they’ve been fully automated. I’m not sure about other companies, but for us, that shift has already happened.
The reality is that there are only about 100,000 dietitians today. These are some of the most caring, hardworking, and impactful people in healthcare, and they play a crucial role in transitioning from a sick-care system to one focused on prevention. But there just aren’t enough of them.
Globally, the demand for dietitians is only growing. America has exported obesity to Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. A lot of people need the help of a dietitian, and AI is making it possible to scale that support.
There simply aren’t enough dietitians to go around. If you asked a dietitian, "Hey, someone in India needs your help," or "Someone across the world needs your guidance," they would be eager to have agents assist in delivering that care. The way these systems are built has to be done responsibly, but leaning into agents is definitely something we see happening.
It’s also expanding the role of a dietitian in ways we never could have imagined. Some of the top 1% of dietitians on our platform are going grocery shopping with their clients. That’s not something 99% of dietitians have the time to do, but with an agent, that level of white-glove service becomes much more scalable.
So I think some of the fears around AI replacing dietitians are short-sighted. The people who are really on the ground, doing the work, see an immense opportunity here.
How do you see Fay’s product evolving over the next 6-12 months? Any specific developments that your customers should be excited about?
We’ve built what I truly believe is a world-class, leading product on the dietitian side, and I’d love to show it off if we ever have the time to go into it. Hot take—I don’t think anyone has built a more sophisticated healthcare product than we have. It’s unheard of for the healthcare industry, and I’ll debate anyone on that topic.
This year, we’re bringing a lot of those impressive fundamentals to the client side. We just launched our client-facing native mobile app in the App Store, and it’s been performing phenomenally well, but it’s still pretty bare-bones in terms of product offering.
We’re going to bring the same level of build quality and design from the dietitian side to the client experience, making it much richer. Features like AI-powered nutrition reviews, client-facing meal planning, and deep integrations with major grocery and meal delivery platforms are all coming. It’s going to be a completely different experience, and a top priority for us is enhancing that dietitian-client relationship. Really excited about what’s ahead.
Lastly, how would you describe the culture at Fay? Are you hiring, and what do you look for in prospective team members joining the Fay?
We are aggressively hiring as quickly as possible. We have over 60 open roles today, and our team is currently just 40 people. We’ve grown far faster than we could have imagined—we’re doing over a million dollars in revenue per headcount.
The business has really outpaced what our small team can handle, so we’re eager to bring on more talent. We’re hiring across the board—software engineering, Android, iOS, and product design, which has been a major priority for us. Operations is also a big focus right now. We’re excited to grow the team and keep scaling.
Conclusion
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