Nearly 90% of U.S. adults carry at least one cardio-kidney-metabolic (CKM) risk factor: obesity, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol. Care for these conditions has stayed fragmented and reactive, treating each one in isolation instead of managing the whole picture.
GLP-1 medications (a drug class originally developed for diabetes that also drives significant weight loss) have made this problem more urgent, not less. Employer pharmacy spend on GLP-1s has climbed fast, but without the clinical infrastructure to manage utilization and sustain behavior change, that spend often doesn't turn into lasting outcomes. The missing piece is a coordinated care model that can guide the right intervention and make it stick. FlyteHealth was built to close that gap.
Capita3 Investment - FlyteHealth Reaches Medicare, Five Years After We Called the Thesis
WHERE IT STARTED:
FlyteHealth's founding team didn't come to healthcare from the outside. They built the science first. Dr. Louis Aronne, the company's co-founder and Chief Medical Advisor, is the Sanford I. Weill Professor of Metabolic Research at Weill Cornell Medicine, where he founded the Comprehensive Weight Control Center in 1987, one of the country's first multidisciplinary obesity treatment programs. Over nearly four decades, he's led more than 65 clinical trials, authored over 150 scientific papers, and served as a principal investigator on studies that brought today's leading GLP-1 medications to market. He's also a founder of the American Board of Obesity Medicine and a past president of The Obesity Society. His core conviction, that obesity is a progressive metabolic disease rather than a failure of willpower, shaped the field, and FlyteHealth is in many ways the delivery vehicle for that conviction at scale.
Dr. Katherine Saunders trained under Dr. Aronne at Weill Cornell and became a board-certified obesity medicine specialist in her own right. As Co-founder and Executive Vice President, she's the one who translated decades of research-grade obesity medicine into a care protocol that's both clinically rigorous and scalable enough to run at FlyteHealth's size. She's also a frequently cited voice in national media on obesity treatment, and her clinical leadership is why every part of the FlyteHealth patient experience reflects current science rather than dated protocols.
Sloan Saunders, Co-founder and now President, built the commercial and operational engine as FlyteHealth's founding CEO. He architected the company's pivotal shift from a software platform supporting outside clinicians into a full-service virtual practice that owns patient outcomes end to end, and he built the employer-facing commercial model and partnership strategy driving FlyteHealth's national scale today.
Together, that team turned FlyteHealth from a software platform into a full-service virtual practice with its own board-certified physicians, dietitians, and health coaches. The company rebranded from Intellihealth to FlyteHealth in 2024, reflecting its expansion from obesity care into the full CKM spectrum. Obesity is one of several connected risk factors, so FlyteHealth now treats hypertension, high cholesterol, prediabetes, and diabetes in the same care plan instead of handing each to a different program.
"It's not just about getting every patient with obesity a GLP-1 prescription. Comprehensive care is the only way to treat this disease." — Dr. Katherine Saunders, Co-founder & EVP
WHAT THEY DO:
FlyteHealth delivers eCKM (early cardio-kidney-metabolic) care through a single, coordinated model built for employers and health plans. Every member starts with baseline labs, a full health assessment, and ASCVD (atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease) risk scoring, then gets routed to the right level of care: prevention, active treatment, or long-term maintenance. FlyteHealth's AI-enabled clinical intelligence platform handles risk stratification and care-pathway assignment behind the scenes, and its EMR-enabled infrastructure keeps FlyteHealth's care teams and in-network providers working from the same page instead of operating as separate silos.
On the treatment side, in-house board-certified physicians, including obesity medicine specialists, cardiologists, and endocrinologists, use non-GLP-1 approaches in more than 70% of cases. That's a deliberate design choice: it drives meaningful prescription savings for employers while still hitting outcome targets like 15%+ weight loss and improved blood pressure and HbA1c at 24 months and beyond. FlyteHealth has also reported reductions of more than 16% in blood pressure and more than 13% in HbA1c.
THE RESULTS SO FAR:
The clearest proof point is FlyteHealth’s partnership with the State of Connecticut, which has been independently evaluated by Milliman and by The Segal Group. More than 11,500 members have enrolled since July 2023. GLP-1 adherence held at 86% at 12 months and 76% at 18 months, against a real-world benchmark of 27% to 42%. Segal compared the 4,980 members with a full year of data to matched non-participants and found medical costs grew more slowly for FlyteHealth members, with roughly $100 per member per month in medical savings before program fees. Segal also estimated $29.7 million in prescription cost avoidance, calculated against the cost of prescribing Wegovy. That evaluation excluded Medicare members, though FlyteHealth has served members 65 and older since its founding.
FlyteHealth has carried that model well beyond Connecticut. In 2025, it launched a program for 1199SEIU Benefit Funds, one of the country's largest healthcare worker union benefit funds. In December 2025, it announced a collaboration with Eli Lilly to expand direct employer access to obesity medications alongside FlyteHealth's care model. In June 2026, it was selected for the Diabetes and Obesity category of the CMS Health Technology Ecosystem, and in July 2026 it reached General Availability within that program, becoming one of the first companies live and available to Medicare beneficiaries. FlyteHealth was recognized for the milestone at the initiative's one-year anniversary event in Washington, D.C. The company has raised nearly $50M to date from investors including Morningside Ventures, Connecticut Innovations, Atlantic Health System, Black Opal Ventures, and Hearst Ventures, and has grown revenue substantially in each of the last two years.
MANAGEMENT:
FlyteHealth's August 2025 leadership change was an internal move, not an outside hire. Dr. Cheryl Pegus had already been serving as FlyteHealth's Executive Chair since October 2024, and stepped into the CEO and Board Chair role. Sloan Saunders, the company's founding CEO, moved into the President seat, and the entire founding team remained at the company through the transition. That continuity says something about how FlyteHealth sees its own trajectory: this is a company adding an experienced operator on top of its existing team as it scales, not one replacing its founders. When Dr. Pegus was named CEO, the company said the appointment reinforced its focus on cardiometabolic care and whole health.
Dr. Pegus spent more than 30 years running health strategy at enterprise scale, as EVP of Health & Wellness at Walmart, President of Consumer Solutions and CMO at Cambia Health Solutions, and the first Chief Medical Officer at Walgreens. She's also co-chair of the Duke-Margolis Capital Impact Council, the group that featured FlyteHealth as a case study in its Health Value-Evidence Quality Framework in February 2026.
WHY CAPITA3 INVESTED:
We invested in FlyteHealth before GLP-1s were a household name. The clinical model FlyteHealth had already built was the reason. When the market caught up, they were ready.
Capita3 first invested in FlyteHealth in June 2021, the same month the FDA approved Wegovy and set off the GLP-1 era. At the time, GLP-1s weren't yet a household name, and employer budgets for these medications weren't yet a boardroom conversation. We saw it anyway. Our conviction was that when GLP-1s scaled, the companies that would capture the value would be the ones with medically rigorous, outcomes-accountable care already built. FlyteHealth's founding team had spent decades building exactly that. Five years later, the thesis has played out in full.
FlyteHealth also checks the other boxes we look for: clinical credibility built in from day one rather than bolted on, a care model with independently verified outcomes that shorten sales cycles, and a go-to-market built around self-insured employers, the payer category most motivated to act on its own cost exposure. That exposure is growing: employers expect health benefit costs per employee to rise 8.2% in 2027, the largest increase since 2003, according to aMarsh surveyof more than 1,800 employers. And in Dr. Katherine Saunders and Sloan Saunders, we backed exactly the kind of founding team Capita3 exists to back: physician-entrepreneurs building from patient outcomes rather than market timing.
WHAT'S NEXT:
FlyteHealth is pushing on three fronts. It's deepening the employer pipeline that the Lilly collaboration and Connecticut results opened up, from state and municipal governments to Fortune 500 companies managing GLP-1 budgets. Having just reached General Availability within the CMS Health Technology Ecosystem, it's now focused on building enrollment through that new Medicare channel. And it's broadening the clinical platform itself: a September 2025 collaboration with cardiovascular care company Heartbeat Health points toward a fuller cardiometabolic offering that goes beyond obesity.
We're proud to back a team that treats this disease with the clinical rigor and dignity it deserves, and that's building the accountability employers and payers are asking for.
