TYLER TANAKA · MIT SLOAN · CONSUMER HEALTH

Consumer health is moving from responding to illness to preventing it.

I'm investing in the companies leading that shift.

Trends I'm Following

What I'm seeing.

These are the shifts driving the rest of the site.

Macro

Consumer health is moving from point solutions to ongoing care

The better companies are not selling a single intervention. They own more of the arc: diagnosis, treatment, adherence, and behavior change.

Mental health is becoming a chronic care problem, not an acute one

The companies winning are not crisis intervention platforms. They are building longitudinal relationships around anxiety, ADHD, and sleep -- and the employer channel is where the distribution is.

Women's health is a category, not a niche

Fertility was the wedge. The expansion into menopause, metabolic health, and autoimmune conditions -- where women are disproportionately affected -- is where the real market is. The GLP-1 overlap makes this a decade-long build.

Economics & Distribution

Insurance-backed products keep beating pure cash-pay health

The strongest products feel consumer-grade up front and reimbursement-backed underneath. That combination controls distribution in a way cash-pay alone cannot.

Primary care is being rebuilt again -- this time asset-light and reimbursement-native

Forward failed. One Medical got absorbed. The next version is async-first, lower cost to operate, and designed around the insurance relationship from day one. Whoever owns the PCP relationship owns the referral stack.

AI makes company building cheaper. It does not remove the need for a wedge.

Small teams can move faster across product, ops, and go-to-market. The edge still comes from distribution, trust, workflow depth, and habit.

Product Wedge

Diagnostics are becoming the front door, not the follow-up

Labs, imaging, and wearables are easier to access than ever. The hard part is building the interpretation layer that turns scattered data into action people trust and act on.

GLP-1s are a commodity. The outcomes infrastructure around them is not.

The real opportunity is not access to the drug. It is nutrition, side-effect management, adherence, diagnostics, and the longitudinal care layer that makes the drug actually work.

Moats

AI works in healthcare when it makes experts faster, not optional

The products gaining real traction are not replacing clinicians or dietitians. They are compressing the time and cost of expert judgment while keeping accountability intact.

Consumer trust in health data is a moat, not a feature

The companies that own longitudinal health relationships -- where someone voluntarily shares labs, wearable data, and symptoms over time -- have a compounding data advantage that is genuinely hard to replicate. This is the infrastructure thesis underneath everything else.

Companies I'm Tracking

Proof points in the market.

A short list of companies that make the thesis concrete.

Nourish

Series B

Insurance-covered nutrition care

Nourish sits in the right place: reimbursed nutrition care tied to real behavior change. This gets stronger if GLP-1 care keeps expanding.

Fay

Series B

Dietitian marketplace and workflow layer

Fay is building both the marketplace and the operating layer. That is the right shape. The open question is whether supply quality stays high as the network scales.

Function Health

Series B

Consumer diagnostics and medical intelligence

The bet is that diagnostics become the front door to a broader health relationship. This only works if interpretation turns into action, not just more data.

Superpower

Series A

Health super-app and biomarker membership

Superpower is aiming bigger than most consumer health products. The product ambition is clear. The risk is trying to bundle too much before a single behavior locks in.

Visana Health

Series A

Virtual-first women's health medical home

Visana fits the shift from narrow women's health point solutions to broader care models. That makes sense. The challenge is executing breadth without losing focus.

Twentyeight Health

Series A

Insurance-enabled women's health access

Twentyeight Health shows what improves when telehealth, Medicaid coverage, and simple product design line up. Access is the wedge here. Retention is the deeper test.

AI Operator Stack

The execution layer.

These tools show how much work a small team can now compress.

Sales & Marketing

Selected tools

GTM automation

Clay

What I'm testing

Signal-based prospecting, enrichment, and workflow automation that replace a surprising amount of SDR and growth ops work.

My take

Best when the ICP is narrow and the workflow is precise. Falls apart when teams use it as a generic personalization machine.

Creative production

Runway

What I'm testing

Fast creative iteration for ads, founder-led content, and landing page tests.

My take

Useful for speed. It increases testing volume, but taste and distribution still decide what wins.

Finance & Analytics

Selected tools

Analysis copilot

ChatGPT

What I'm testing

First-pass help on cohort analysis, scenario work, KPI framing, and memos.

My take

Strong for synthesis. Good at getting to the right questions faster. Final judgment still sits with the operator holding the model.

Collaborative analytics

Hex

What I'm testing

A faster path from raw data to exploratory analysis and reporting.

My take

A good fit for lean teams that need answers before they need a full data stack.

Research & Diligence

Selected tools

Search and synthesis

Perplexity

What I'm testing

Fast first-pass work on markets, competitors, customer behavior, and recent company developments.

My take

Very good for speed. Not good enough to replace primary sources or original judgment.

Source-grounded research

NotebookLM

What I'm testing

Synthesis across transcripts, PDFs, decks, and reports while staying inside the source set.

My take

Useful when the job is comparing documents without drifting into summary slop.

Founder Productivity

Selected tools

Writing and reasoning

Claude

What I'm testing

Long-form writing, strategy articulation, and structured thinking around messy operating questions.

My take

Still one of the best tools for turning rough thinking into clean structure.

Meeting workflow

Granola

What I'm testing

Lower-friction note capture and better follow-through across many parallel threads.

My take

The win is not notes. The win is less coordination drag.

About

How I think about consumer health.

I'm Tyler Tanaka, an MBA candidate at MIT Sloan and a former investor at Translink Capital, where I helped build the firm's consumer health practice and worked on Series A investments across health and wellness.

Before venture, I worked in M&A diligence at EY, which shaped how I think about infrastructure, business models, and what sits underneath consumer-facing products.

This site is where I work through the market shifts I keep coming back to. If anything here overlaps with what you're building or investing in, I'd like to hear about it.

tanaka5@mit.edu

MIT Sloan - Class of 2026