Most people don’t wake up thinking about ordering bloodwork, adjusting their sleep cycles, or fine-tuning a training plan. That usually happens later… if it happens at all. Betterness is betting that this gap between intention and action is exactly where its new product belongs.
The Miami-based startup just raised $2.5 million and stepped into a very different version of itself. What began as a consumer-facing longevity platform is now positioning itself as something more foundational: the system that runs behind the scenes of how health and wellness actually get managed.
At the center of that shift is Bett-i, a voice-first AI life coach.
“When we started Betterness, the question was whether AI could help any single person live better,” Demian Bellumio, Betterness’s co-founder and co-CEO, shared in a statement. “Two years later the answer is obvious – and the real question has become whether AI can help every clinic, every gym, every longevity program, and every wellness brand run better.”
He continued: “Our job now is to build the agentic infrastructure that makes that possible. Closing this round, launching Bett-i, and preparing Betterness One for enterprise is the trifecta that takes us there.”
Bett-i is meant to function more like a system that sits alongside your day, making decisions and taking action based on what it sees.
Instead of logging into an app, users can speak to it. Instead of tracking data manually, it pulls from wearables and lab results. Instead of offering suggestions, it executes: ordering tests, adjusting plans, or sending reminders without being asked.
That shift from reactive to proactive is the core idea.
“Precision health has always existed – but only for those who could afford it. Bett-i was built to change that,” added co-founder and co-CEO Ari Katz. “Bett-i coaches people through the most important decisions they make about their own health and wellness – autonomously, in their voice, with the full context of their life. Not when they remember to open an app. Just continuously, proactively, in their corner, keeping up with their real life 24/7. That’s what everyone deserves. That’s what everyone wants. That’s what we built.”
Under the hood, Bett-i runs on what the company calls its Model Context Protocol, or MCP. It’s a system designed to connect data sources (labs, wearables, providers) and make them usable by AI agents that can act on that information.
In practice, that means Bett-i is coordinating across a network of tools and services, all while keeping a running understanding of a person’s health context.
That same infrastructure is also where Betterness sees its bigger opportunity. The consumer product is just one layer. The next is Betterness One, an enterprise system aimed at clinics, gyms, and wellness brands. The pitch there is simple: automate operations, reduce admin work, and keep users engaged.
“As a founder and after 30 years leading tech teams, I have taken the lead in coding, and reprogrammed the entire code base from the bottom up myself,” Bellumio told Refresh Miami via email. “Never written a line of code before!”
“I have 7 engineers and I wrote (vibe coding of course) more code over the last 90 days than all of them combined to build this product that is first of its kind,” Bellumio continued.
Health and wellness is a massive, fragmented market, projected to reach $323 billion by 2030 but often slow to adopt new systems. At the same time, AI is moving quickly enough to force a rethink of how those systems should work in the first place.
Betterness is trying to sit right at that intersection.
The investor list reflects that ambition. It pulls from health-tech operators, doctors, athletes, and even cultural figures tied to wellness and lifestyle. Miami-affiliated names include Carlos Domingo, co-founder and CEO of Securitize; David Garcia, CIO and managing partner at Borderless Capital; serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky; Justin Stone, former general council of Papa; and Alan Faena of the eponymous hotel chain.
Ultimately, Betterness is pushing on a question that’s starting to feel unavoidable: if AI can run large parts of your workday, how long before it starts running your life outside of it too?
Image at the top of the post shows co-founder and CEO Demian Bellumio (left) with Betterness advisor Dr. Lloyd Camper, MD.
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