Sam Jactel: The Patient Who Built the Gut Clinic He Couldn’t Find

Sam Jactel has a line about what a chronic gut diagnosis actually comes with. Doctors, he says, encourage the medication, the careful diet, the attention to the link between mind and gut, “but the best I ever received was a pamphlet and instructions to ‘go figure it out’ on my own.” He was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 2014. In the years since, by his own account, he has had six significant flares, and every one of them ended in an emergency room. On September 16 the company he built in response, a Boston-based virtual digestive health clinic called Ayble Health, announced a $16 million Series A. His name for it is simpler than the press release’s: “the care I wish existed when I was diagnosed.”

The patientFive gastroenterologists, seven drugs, and a homemade tool

The part of Jactel’s story that tends to stop people is the phrase he puts in the middle of it. “I have been misdiagnosed twice, seen five different gastroenterologists, and played around with a cocktail of seven different drugs to get my disease under control,” he told Authority Magazine in 2023. “But despite having access to all of this care — and being able to afford it — I’ve fallen out of remission five times.” He is describing the good version of the American health system, the one with insurance and specialists, and saying it still left him alone between appointments. Four members of his immediate family are gut patients too. He calls the whole thing “a long, frustrating, complex, and oftentimes embarrassing and stigmatized journey.”

What became Ayble started small. “While dealing with my fifth flare a couple of years ago, I built a simple, but surprisingly effective, low-tech tool to help me identify foods that were causing me to feel unwell,” he told Fitt Insider. “I shared it with a community of other patients I was connected with, and they found it was just as effective as I had.” He has a phrase for what people in his position end up doing: they “become the ‘CEOs’ of their own disease — showing resilience, creative problem solving and connecting siloed care — when the health system around them just isn’t cutting it.”

The resumeNot a doctor, and careful about it

Jactel is not a clinician, and nothing about the company pretends otherwise. He holds an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, class of 2021, and his earlier career ran through pediatric pathology research at Emory, where he was first author on a published paper, and healthcare strategy consulting at Accenture, as he recounts in an essay for Kellogg. The line in the pull quote above is advice he credits to Dr. Kate Wolin, a co-author on the company’s first study, and he explains it this way: “Especially as a patient founder, it’s important to approach the problem you have felt with a grain of salt. You are not everyone else, and it’s dangerous to make that assumption.” It is an unusually self-aware thing for a founder to say out loud, and it shaped the order in which he did things. He ran a formal study of his food-trigger tool before he raised his first round.

The clinicWhat Ayble is now

Ayble today describes itself as “a virtual medical practice that bills your insurance.” A patient is matched with a team of doctors and nurse practitioners, registered dietitians, pharmacists, behavioral health specialists and health coaches working from one care plan, with a free app for logging meals and symptoms, scanning food barcodes and messaging the team. The brain-gut programs, the guided audio on mindfulness, hypnosis, cognitive behavioral therapy and breathing techniques, were co-developed with Cleveland Clinic, which added Ayble to its own digestive disease care model in 2024. The company says most copays land between $0 and $30 a visit. In early September it became the first digestive health provider in Amazon’s Health Benefits Connector, and says it now operates in all 50 states.

The new money, from a round led by the venture firm Neon with Upfront Ventures, M13, Cleveland Clinic Ventures and others, brings the total raised to what the company says is over $27 million. Jactel told MedCity News it will go toward better personalization, more health plans and employers, and a step beyond the gut into autoimmune conditions, “starting directly with autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and autoimmune thyroid disorders.” The reasoning is a patient’s reasoning. “Many patients are also managing autoimmune conditions,” he said in the announcement, “and too often, no one is treating the whole picture.”

The evidencePublished early, and honest about what is missing

“At Ayble, we knew we couldn’t just ‘move fast and break things,’” Jactel wrote in a post explaining the raise. “When you are dealing with a patient’s health, you don’t take shortcuts.” The record backs the sentiment, and it is worth being precise about what the record is. Two outcome studies of Ayble itself have been published in peer-reviewed journals. The first, in Clinical and Translational Gastroenterology in 2023, followed 37 people with IBS, some of whom also had inflammatory bowel disease, through a nine-week personalized elimination diet delivered by app: 81 percent had significant symptom improvement at the midpoint and 70 percent at the end. The second, in Neurogastroenterology & Motility in 2025, with co-authors from Cleveland Clinic, the University of Washington and the Rome Foundation, tracked 202 people with IBS using the full program. Their average score on the standard IBS severity scale fell from 286 to 146, and 86 percent improved by at least 50 points, the conventional threshold for a clinically meaningful change.

Neither study had a comparison group, and both say so plainly. The pilot calls itself “small” and “uncontrolled”; the larger study notes that the absence of a randomized design “increases the risk for bias and placebo effects” and that most participants were “self-referred and motivated.” Jactel is an author on both, with stock options in the company, as the papers disclose, and both end by calling for randomized trials. That is also roughly where the independent read lands. When the nonprofit Peterson Health Technology Institute assessed virtual gut care this year, it found that these services as a category improve outcomes for people with IBS and IBD, counted Ayble’s evidence as two single-arm studies with a low risk of bias, rated the certainty of evidence for clinician-led services like Ayble’s as lower, and noted that no study has yet measured Ayble’s effect on costs. We would put it this way: for a company of its size and age, Ayble has published more than most, its results point in a good direction, and the controlled trial is the piece still to come. We will be glad to read it.

The disclosure mapWhere his interests sit

Jactel is the founder and chief executive of Ayble, with the financial stake that implies, and he co-authored the company’s own studies. Cleveland Clinic appears in this story four times, as a clinical partner, as the home of several of Ayble’s advisers, as a co-author institution on the 2025 study and, through its venture arm, as an investor; none of that is hidden, and all of it is worth knowing when you weigh the endorsement. Ayble’s customers are employers and health plans as well as patients, and the figures in its marketing about savings and improvement rates are the company’s own and have not been tested in a controlled study. He is a patient and a founder, not a physician, and his account of his own disease is his experience, not advice; anyone with ongoing gut symptoms should start with their own doctor. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with Ayble Health. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from the company.