Bengaluru: When Ritij Agarwal moved to Noida for a job in product operations at a fintech startup, his meals increasingly came from delivery apps Swiggy and Zomato. A couple of years ago, he decided to try something different.
“My junk food intake was quite high. I thought it would be a good idea to use an app like Healthify, which can track calorie intake,” he said.
What began as simple calorie tracking soon became more structured. When he started working out, the app’s macro breakdowns helped him monitor his protein intake more closely. The numbers offered a way to measure progress daily, visibly, and with some precision.
Agarwal isn’t the only one. Gauraang Arora, a content creator, downloaded the app with a specific goal: to stay in a calorie deficit while getting as close to his protein targets as possible. “The app could be faster, more optimized, less pushy about new features,” he said. “But it does the work.”
For over a decade, Healthify has been translating everyday Indian eating into something measurable, building not just a fitness app, but a behavioural archive of a country learning to worry about its metabolism. And so, on any given morning, before India’s offices come alive, millions of breakfasts are converted into numbers. A bowl of poha becomes 200 calories. Chapatis, dosas and pooris all become data points.
When it started in 2012, the idea felt almost premature. India was only beginning to embrace food delivery apps and venture capital was chasing e-commerce and mobility. ‘Wellness’ was not yet an industry. Healthify began as a simple meal-tracking app, and later introduced personalized coaching to drive accountability and sustained behaviour change. Today, the company claims to have over 40 million registered users.
Since its founding, Healthify has raised about $150 million from global investors. For years, its pitch was simple: technology plus human accountability. An Indian calorie counter, but with a real coach who would notice when you fell off track. In a market crowded with generic fitness apps, that human layer became its moat.
But scale in consumer health is unforgiving. Coaching is high-touch and expensive and subscriptions are fickle. Even with tens of millions of downloads, turning engagement into durable profits is a different challenge altogether.
As growth in Healthify’s home market slowed and the economics of coaching tightened, the global weight-loss industry was being reshaped by a new force: GLP-1 drugs. In the US, medications originally developed for diabetes were suddenly transforming obesity care, commanding high prices, attracting insurers and pulling weight management into the clinical mainstream.
“Our vision is that the future of weight management is going to be GLP plus AI plus dietitian in the loop. And that’s a model that I think is globally scalable. And with the rise of GLPs and AI (artificial intelligence) in the world, Healthify is very well positioned to be able to take that traction in multiple markets,” Tushar Vashisht, chief executive officer (CEO) of Healthify, told Mint.
The US market, with higher willingness to pay and a clinical orientation toward obesity, offers a lucrative pathway.
The opportunity is large. The timing, Vashisht says, is right. Whether this expansion into GLP-1 and the US market becomes a durable growth engine and how it reshapes the company’s coaching-led identity will unfold over the next few years.
The original idea
When Vashisht moved back to India, he found himself becoming heavier. “The trigger to start the company was, frankly, that I ended up gaining some 25 kilos after coming to India,” he said.
What began as a personal reckoning quickly revealed something larger.
In 2000, roughly a billion people globally were classified as overweight. Today, that number is closer to three billion. India alone has seen obesity rates significantly increase over the past two decades.
Healthify’s earliest thesis was that you cannot change what you cannot measure. The company’s first product was a calorie-counting and nutrition-tracking system built initially for Indian foods, a gap global apps had largely ignored, and later expanded to international databases.
But data alone did not move the needle. Through early experiments, the company realized that what truly drove outcomes was accountability. “To change, you need an accountability partner,” he said. That insight led Healthify to layer in dietitians, trainers and coaches or human guides who could help users move from intent to action.
Yet the coaching model had limits. A single coach could only manage 40 or 50 clients at a time. Scale was constrained by human bandwidth. That constraint pushed Healthify toward its defining bet—AI.
Beginning around 2017, the company started using AI internally to augment its coaches, including helping them analyse data, personalize plans and increase efficiency. The result, Vashisht said, was a change in leverage. Coaches who once handled a few dozen clients could now manage 250 to 300 without what he describes as a loss of quality. AI, in his telling, turned dietitians into “super dietitians”.
Around the time of the covid-19 pandemic, Healthify took the next step of launching what it described as the world’s first direct-to-consumer AI diet subscription, anchored by its virtual agent Ria. Vashisht noted that a peer-reviewed Stanford study during the pandemic examined the company’s outcomes data, finding that while AI plus human coaching delivered stronger results, AI alone could also drive measurable weight loss.
The India question
Over the past two years, Healthify has recalibrated its India operations. In 2024, the company laid off around 150 employees as part of a broader effort to streamline costs. Employee benefit expenses, historically one of its largest outlays, fell from ₹85 crore in fiscal year 2024 (FY24) to ₹59 crore in FY25. The sharper cost discipline helped narrow losses, bringing them down to ₹4 crore in FY25 from ₹88 crore in FY24.
The balance sheet was improving. Growth, however, was not. HealthifyMe Wellness Pvt. Ltd, the group’s Indian entity, reported standalone operating revenue of ₹177 crore in FY25, a 14% decline from ₹206 crore the previous year. After years of expansion, the domestic business appeared to be plateauing.
The company, which has raised capital from marquee investors including HealthQuad and Khosla Ventures, has faced pressure to show a clearer path to profitability in its home market. Healthify has begun gating more features behind paywalls while ramping up ads on the platform, marking a clear shift toward revenue optimization.
“We realized that from a growth profile, there are limitations to the India market without GLP-1,” said Vashisht, pointing to the structural constraints of monetizing digital health in a price-sensitive market. One of the experiments that fell short was Healthify’s attempt to build a health foods brand in the country, according to Vashisht.
Indeed, building a profitable consumer health app in India has proven notoriously difficult. Customers are highly value-conscious, subscription fatigue is real, and churn can spike quickly if outcomes are not immediate or measurable, according to Paramdeep Singh, founder of Long Tail Ventures, an investor in health-tech companies such as Clinikally and CarePay.
Healthify currently has 1.25 million monthly active users in India and 80,000 active users in the US. About 10% are paying users.
The operational tightening has had ripple effects. Multiple current and former employees say that in 2024, coaches were being removed frequently.
At its peak, Healthify employed more than 1,000 coaches. That number has since been pared to 300-400, as the company sharpened its focus on efficiency and automation.
In certain cases, users experienced multiple coach changes or temporary gaps in assignment. In a model built on accountability and continuity, such disruptions risk eroding trust.
Continuity of care is system-led, not person-led, according to Vashisht. “All plans, progress logs, notes and interactions are centralized within our coaching dashboard, which enables smooth, well-documented handoffs without loss of context,” he claimed.
Multiple coaches Mint spoke to said performance pressure has risen since 2024. Each coach typically manages 250-300 clients. Last year, the company introduced revised performance clauses requiring coaches to keep at least 70% of their assigned clients “active,” failing which compensation could be impacted.
Vashisht described these changes as part of a broader attempt to standardize outcomes as the platform scaled.
“I do think that the dietitian plays a strong role in outcomes. I don’t think the dietitian plan is going anywhere,” he said.
Over a five-to-ten-year horizon, however, Vashisht expects AI systems to scale far more rapidly than the coaching workforce.
Industry observers say these tensions are not unique to Healthify. In India, willingness to pay for digital health is still limited unless there is a clear clinical outcome. Distribution adds another layer of complexity. Preventive care remains weakly integrated into insurance reimbursement, limiting structural demand. “Lifetime value becomes hard to justify against rising acquisition costs,” said Long Tail’s Singh.
The GLP opportunity
GLP-1 drugs, a class of medications originally developed for type-2 diabetes that also induce significant weight loss, have rapidly reshaped the global obesity market. Now, that shift is coming to India, and may potentially open up a new opportunity for Healthify.
Explaining the size of the prize, Srikanth Mahadevan, director at Deloitte India, noted that 2026 could mark a defining inflection point. That is when semaglutide, the active ingredient in several leading GLP-1 therapies, is expected to go off patent in India, potentially opening the floodgates for lower-cost generics.
“What was once a premium, niche intervention will rapidly become a scalable, accessible solution,” Mahadevan said. He estimates that the shift could unlock 120,000-150,000 incremental patients across diabetes and weight management in the near term. Nearly 70–80% of India’s GLP-1 Phase III pipeline is centred on semaglutide, signalling strong industry confidence in its affordability and scale. Indian pharmaceutical companies are also positioning themselves as global suppliers of semaglutide generics across more than 80 markets, said Mahadevan.
But the platform opportunity is different from the drug opportunity. While GLP-1 therapies can be a powerful medical enabler, long-term metabolic outcomes would depend on much more than medication alone.
“Sustainable success requires integrated nutrition, activity and vitals tracking. The real opportunity lies in combining pharmacotherapy with continuous digital coaching and data-driven lifestyle support,” said Sumeet Chandna, life sciences partner at EY Parthenon India.
That intersection—medication plus behavioural support—is where Healthify sees its role. The company launched its HealthifyRx programme, which combines GLP-1 medications with clinician-led care, digital coaching and lifestyle support, last April.
“With our AI foundation, we realized that GLPs are an amazing molecule that almost guarantee weight loss,” said Vashisht. “But it needs assistance and support.”
The company has already begun building partnerships. Healthify recently announced a collaboration with Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, which specializes in diabetes and obesity drugs, in India and is evaluating additional partnerships both at home and globally.
GLP-linked revenue already contributes a double-digit percentage of Healthify’s topline, claimed Vashisht. “In the next two to three years, I believe this could become the majority of our revenue stream,” he added.
Yet, scaling up this model will not be straightforward. As demand for GLP-1 therapies rises, digital platforms are positioning themselves across the care continuum, from awareness and teleconsultations to prescription fulfilment and last-mile delivery. But the model comes with regulatory scrutiny, prescription verification norms, cold-chain logistics requirements and the need for ongoing clinical monitoring, Chandna pointed out.
Eye on America
If GLP-1 represents the product inflection, the US represents the market inflection.
For Healthify, the US is attractive not just because of its size, but because of how healthcare is structured. During the pandemic, dietitian consultations became reimbursable under many insurance plans, meaning patients can claim the cost of nutrition counselling through their health coverage. “In the US, dietitians have become a reimbursable product. Most insurance plans offer dietitian time. That allows us to drive a much stronger go-to-market motion,” said Vashisht.
International expansion had long been part of the company’s ambition, but the push intensified in 2024, when Healthify raised about $20 million to expand its US operations.
The early numbers, Vashisht said, are encouraging. Retention rates in the US are roughly double those in India. The company claims day-three retention north of 50% and day-seven retention above 30%, significantly higher than industry benchmarks, which typically range between 20-25% and 15-18%, respectively. Average revenue per user in the US is at least three times that in India.
The economic equation, however, cuts both ways. The US offers higher average revenue per user, but the bar is much higher, said experts. Customer acquisition costs can be several times higher than in India, and regulatory complexity adds friction. Reimbursement compliance, malpractice exposure and prescription oversight create additional layers of scrutiny. At the same time, Healthify is competing with well-funded telehealth platforms and employer-backed wellness programmes, making distribution a critical differentiator.
Today, Healthify sits at the intersection of AI, medication and global expansion. Whether that is mission drift or natural evolution will determine not just its profitability, but what kind of company it ultimately becomes.