Introducing AVA and Intelligent Eating
About 5 years ago, my fellow SoFi co-founders and I believed we could build a better banking system by reimagining the customer experience. We were still graduate students at the time, so student loans were obviously top of mind — most of us had loans and felt there wasn’t a product in the market that met our needs. So we decided to create one with SoFi’s alumni funded student loan program. SoFi has since expanded into one of the largest marketplace lenders in the industry and continues to resonate with young professionals across the country.
In the summer of 2015, I made the decision to join DCM Ventures, one of SoFi’s lead investors as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR). With their support, I had the opportunity to look at new business ideas that could have a similar impact on consumer experiences beyond financial services.
One of the areas we explored was the future of nutrition across production and consumption. As crowded as it is, the field of nutrition still seemed to be lacking that “big idea” that combined modern nutritional information with technology to give users more personalized options. With a spectrum ranging from weight loss to healthy eating, the consistent pain point I heard when talking to people was that it’s difficult to remain accountable for healthy eating decisions over a long period of time.
After countless prototypes and launching an Alpha program earlier this year, we landed on a vision for the future of nutritional advice, a new venture we named AVA that tackles what we call ‘intelligent eating.’
Eating healthy starts with understanding what you’re eating on a frequent basis, but we all know that tracking what you eat, and trying to determine the nutritional information of certain meals requires a significant amount of effort. With AVA, we’ve addressed that problem and have developed the first auto-calorie estimating and tracking tool that doesn’t require the user to do any of the heavy lifting — just take a picture of what you eat — it’s as simple as that. Behind the scenes, we connect our users with in-house dietitians and nutritionists. This team provides real-time feedback and uses cutting edge artificial intelligence to recommend eating plans based on personal preferences, accessibility to food, and most importantly, individual nutritional goals.
We’re excited about the feedback we’ve received from our early users and believe AVA will make healthy eating decisions easier for many of us.
I’d also like to officially announce the investment partners who are supporting us in making this vision a reality: DCM Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. With their support, we look forward to sharing more about AVA’s unique and personalized eating programs with you over the next few months as we bring our full vision to the market.
And if you’re interested in joining AVA as part of our private beta, you can sign up here. We’d love your feedback.
