Android Update Source: Glow, The Fertility App Founded By Max Levchin, Partners With MyFitnessPal To Add BMI Data Into Babymaking

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Glow, The Fertility App Founded By Max Levchin, Partners With MyFitnessPal To Add BMI Data Into Babymaking

Glow, the fertility tracking app co-founded by Max Levchin, is announcing today that it’s inked a partnership with MyFitnessPal, the popular diet and exercise tracking app.

Starting today, users of Glow and MyFitnessPal will be able to connect their accounts. At first, Glow is only incorporating MyFitnessPal data about users’ body mass index (BMI), which is calculated from height and weight, Glow CEO Mike Huang said in a phone call from the company’s Shanghai office this week.

“We did our research on this, and according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, BMI is a big factor in one’s chance to get pregnant. If you are too high, or too low below the established norm, it can cause you to have more irregular menstrual cycles and have more difficulty conceiving.”

But eventually, the goal of this partnership and others that could be established in the future is to incorporate as much relevant health data possible to give the full personalized picture of a woman’s fertility on a day-to-day basis through Glow’s ‘Genius’ feature. He said:

“Our core mission is around data. Eventually, this could allow us to incorporate all sorts of data — how users eat, drink, and exercise — into our machine learning algorithm.”

Glow, which launched its app on iOS in August and plans to launch on Android in the future, has raised $6 million from investors including Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. Huang declined to provide specific user growth numbers, but said “we are seeing very exciting adoption not only in the U.S., but also all across the world. And the number of people who have been telling us they got pregnant within a very short amount of time [since the app launched] is very exciting to us, too.”

I sat down with Huang in Glow’s San Francisco office this past summer to see the app in person when it launched. You can watch that in the video below.

I also talked a bit with Levchin about where the concept for Glow came from and why he decided to first target the fertility space. Watch that in the video embedded below.