Noom, which developed a set of virtual coaches, including one to help people lose weight, has raised a little more than $15.1 million to fund research and development for its apps, along with more mundane business expenses like salaries, according to a Form D filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company was part of the New York Digital Health Accelerator’s second class, which graduated at the end of last year.
The fundraise coincided with a licensing deal Noom did with Rodale Press. Noom Coach, an Android weight loss app that boasts 28 million downloads, will provide access to 1,100 healthy recipes from Rodale’s magazine portfolio as healthy suggestions for app users.
The company’s Noom Weight app helps users manage weight loss by listing meals they’ve had, listing daily tasks like workout schedule and supplementing those nudges with content from publications to match up with the user’s preferences. It rates the quality of the user’s food choices and suggests meals to prepare. After offering the weight loss app for Android, it also rolled out a version for the iOS network. Other apps concentrate on fitness rather than weight loss, including one for cardiology and another for walking.
Last year Noom raised about $4.1 million. Qualcomm Ventures is among the company’s investors.
This month, to coincide with the annual ritual of New Year’s resolutions, the company kicked off an initiative to post small, simple challenges daily “to create habits that will favorably affect your health and mood,” according to a blog post on the company’s website.
Earlier this year it unveiled a rebranding of the company that included a more visually appealing interface.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
