The era of voice is here. Here are three business areas leading the way.

Speech recognition and artificial intelligence are changing how we interact with everything. Voice as a user interface has been a topic for discussion for years, but we believe that the technology finally is accurate enough with sufficiently low latency to provide an experience similar to other forms of interaction. A leading indicator for this is how the adoption of smart assistants from Apple, Google, Amazon, and others has gone mainstream with smart speaker penetration at 34% in the US. Smartphones are already embedded with algorithms enabling voice-based interaction.

Around half of adult Internet users are now using voice technology in some way — whether it’s through voice assistants on their smartphones, in their vehicles, or in their homes [1].

The advantages of voice

We think the addition of a voice user interface draws many parallels with prior UI changes, for example, the ways in which our interactions with technology have changed with the addition of touch screens, graphical interfaces, and keyboards. Voice has a few key advantages over these technologies, and we expect voice to become a core user interface, coexisting with existing technologies.

1. Productivity: Americans type at an average rate of 40 words per minute, but speak at an average of 150 words per minute — more than three times faster. This means that voice-enabling tasks that would normally require a keyboard can result in huge productivity increases, not to mention the simplification and streamlining of numerous daily tasks.

2. Improved user experience: Enabling analytics, for example on customer and sales calls, can significantly improve processes as well as the overall user experience.

3. Safety: Enabling hands-free engagement is particularly important in environments like industrial work sites and vehicles, where screen engagement is limited or impossible.

Spoken versus conversational language

Key speech and natural language processing technologies include attention detection. This is a lightweight, locally processed command (e.g., “Alexa” or “Hey Siri”) that ‘wakes up’ the application or technology. They also include speech recognition, which recognizes and translates spoken language; natural-language understanding (NLU) and/or interpretation (NLI), which deals with ‘intent’ processing or comprehension; and speech synthesis, which is the ability to produce human speech.

Currently, even the most sophisticated smart assistants only understand a small subset of user intent. For example, Amazon Alexa’s skills are, for the most part, manually programmed and solve one specific command or ‘intent’ at a time. Conversational language is much more complex, and natural language processing is considered a particularly ‘AI-hard’ problem to solve.

Nevertheless, deep learning, and increased computational power and connectivity have significantly improved voice recognition. In 2017, Google’s machine learning word accuracy in US English reached 95%, the threshold for human accuracy. By late 2019, Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant had racked up more than 100,000 ‘skills’ [2]. And the use of voice assistants is expected to triple over the next few years, to 8 billion by 2023 [3].

Value-added use cases for voice-enabled technology

Despite the hype around smart speakers and smartphone-embedded voice assistants, we believe that a majority of value is in B2B use cases, where significant economic value can be unlocked through voice. The vast majority of consumer use cases remain ‘nice to have’ rather than ‘must have’ and do not necessarily improve our daily lives in a meaningful way. A few examples of what we believe are use cases with strong value propositions include:

1. Customer service. A voice interface can provide automatic, conversational responses to a growing subset of customer service calls, such as appointment bookings and common support/helpdesk queries, reducing the need for human interaction to handle repetitive tasks and calls. Conversational transparency can be a powerful tool for discovering new customer-driven product recommendations and improving processes, which is an opportunity that companies like Chorus, Speechmatics, and i2x are addressing.

2. Integration of voice with AR/VR solutions. This provides an even deeper level of productivity improvement. One example of this is the Varjo VR display, which is being integrated with voice-assistant technology to provide a totally immersive environment for industrial design and engineering. An other is Realwear, whose flagship product, a head-mounted, wearable, Android-class tablet computer, is safely controlled with voice and thus frees a worker’s hands for dangerous jobs.

3. Workflow augmentation. Consider professions like healthcare and field services. These two professions are very different in nature, but both involve diagnosis and treatment/maintenance. A lot of time is spent diagnosing the problem and recording the issue. Combining these workflows saves a considerable amount of time and reduces the risk of human error. Medical professionals currently spend 1–2 hours per day manually entering data into health record systems. Companies like Corti are combining voice with AI, providing a digital assistant that can analyze patient interviews and provide support for emergency calls. On the consumer side of healthcare, one example of re-engineering an existing application for voice is a feature in the Lifesum Health app that enables Google Assistant users to log meals into the app using voice only (Lifesum is an NGP Capital portfolio company).

Voice — the new future of interaction?

Technology challenges (and opportunities) with voice remain in a number of areas. While training general-purpose speech-recognition solutions requires thousands of hours of data, low-resource languages (e.g., Haitian, Zulu, Assamese) and certain domain-specific applications have significantly lower data requirements, providing an opportunity for applying deep learning techniques to build solutions for these scenarios. Small-footprint devices will need technologies that ensure industry-level accuracy and voice quality in devices with lightweight processors, memory, and power sources.

Conversational UIs have the potential to change the way people interact with technology at home and in businesses, but it will take years before we get to a generalized conversational interface.

In the mean time, a host of companies, large and small, are focusing their efforts on the difficult technology challenges that still need to be overcome, and on the specific needs of those vertical and horizontal applications that would benefit most from a voice-enabled user interface.

We believe that voice, as a user interface, is here to stay, along with touch screens, GUIs, keyboards, and the like. However, we still lack the killer apps. Maybe that is why Alibaba announced last month a further $1.4B investment in its smart speaker ecosystem.

[1] https://blog.globalwebindex.com/chart-of-the-week/voice-assistants-2019/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/912856/amazon-alexa-skills-growth/

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/report-voice-assistants-in-use-to-triple-to-8-billion-by-2023/

Venture capital is developing as an industry. Funds are growing in size and number as well as variety of functions within. More funds are going beyond capital and providing a wide range of value-added services to their portfolio companies in order to differentiate themselves and increase their financial returns. These value-added activities range from producing podcasts and writing blog posts to offering functional expertise in terms of business development, hiring, and even engineering. The former is probably as much about sharing knowledge as it is about positioning in order to create deal flow while the latter is intended to have a direct impact to a portfolio company.

We wanted to know more what companies are thinking about this topic and what do they expect from their investors regarding value add beyond capital? We sent a survey to about 200 CEOs & founders in our network, mainly in the US and Europe, including some of our portfolio companies, to get a snapshot in time of what these leaders and founders think about this topic. We asked the recipients to click through an anonymous Web survey of 30 written statements about what they expect from their investors, rating each statement on a scale of 1 to 5 as to whether they thought it is not valuable at all (1) or valued it a lot (5). Roughly every sixth recipient replied the entire survey. Here are the three most interesting results:

1. Companies want connections to investors and business partners

The most highlighted expectation among the respondents was to get their investors to open their networks and connect them with potential new investors. The survey also highlighted interest in getting doors opened to partners that can have an impact on their business. Corporate venture capital players, in particular, position themselves to provide unparalleled strategic value-add through their affiliation with their corporate parents and investors on this last point.

2. International perspective is important

Expanding into new markets and gaining international perspective stood out as an interesting topic that most of these companies ranked high. These days innovation is global, there are multiple hubs around the world and companies are interested to understand what is going outside their immediate purview. This is a topic where investors, especially ones with activities across multiple regions can support and make a difference. Venture funds, including us, invest a lot time to foster inter-portfolio company interaction through events and other means of communication, basically getting a lot of founders and CEOs together and in our case from all over the world. Supporting these interactions among companies and their management teams is intended to create a network for sharing lessons learned and add value. Entrepreneurs tend to be more open to discuss their challenges and learn from their peers compared to their investors and board members. Often the peer group have relevant, up to date, operational experience on matters that their investors don’t have. This is not a substitute for a trusted investor-company relationship but a very useful add on.

3. Operational value-added services are not high on the list

Our survey suggests that companies don’t put operational support high on their investor wish list items. One VC firm shared and interesting anecdote with me about a case where they had introduced their fund to an entrepreneur and highlighted their ability to assist with several operational topics. The entrepreneur had told them that if they thought the company required all this support on all these operational topics then why were they interested in investing in the first place. In that particular case the company partnered with another investor instead. This does not mean that offering operational know-how and other value-added services to portfolio companies don’t make a difference. However, it does not appear to be high on the list. One thing to consider, depending on the stage of the company, is that these expectations may be different for earlier stage companies which may be more interested in operational support from the get go.

To conclude, based on a survey of our network, entrepreneurs expect their investors to provide access to follow on investors, open doors for business development and provide international perspective beyond capital above anything else. One needs to consider that this type of survey should always be taken with a grain of salt. The sample size is not that large and is likely biased towards later stage companies. How we framed the questions may have impacted the replies. But nevertheless, this snapshot provides some food for thought on what venture investors should consider when positioning themselves and providing their value adding services.

by Walter Masalin, Partner @ NGP Capital

What do companies expect from their investors and the 3 key findings regarding value adding… was originally published in NGP Capital Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of my partners suggested that I check out the book “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” by P. Tetlock and D. Gardner, given my strong emphasis on metrics-driven approach to investing. I found the book a fascinating read; the topic is relevant to anyone who wants to improve their decision-making. There are many reviews and points written about it already including an insightful article in HBR focusing on Company’s decision making but below my key takeaways.

The opening arguments of the book suggest that forecasting accuracy has not been consistently tracked over time unlike in other fields which was a big surprise to me. How can anyone expect to become better at making predictions without the feedback data on the accuracy of past predictions? This resonates well with me as I have seen through my investments in the consumer internet space how important data driven product design is and how constant iteration that is based on actual data is the key to success.

Co-author of the book Philip Tetlock is a Professor in Psychology and Organizational Behavior who ran forecasting tournaments from 1984 to 2003. These tournaments were focused on politics and current events, and the purpose was to analyze and track forecasting accuracy among different groups of people. The book is basically a summary of his observations from this study and his other work on the topic. Many of the findings presented are based on results from the “Good Judgment Project” (GJP), a research collaborative co-led by Tetlock. This project used more than 10,000 carefully selected volunteers making predictions about geopolitical and economic events over a 1–4-year timespan, resulting in more than one million individual forecasts giving a lot of credibility on the findings.

What makes a good prediction?

The data showed that the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee — one might just as well have been guessing the outcomes without putting any real effort into the forecasts. However, as in most cases, it turns out it is not that black and white. There were two distinct groups of experts; one group that performed worse than random guessing, and another group that performed better. What did this second group do differently?

The key to accurate forecasting was — to my surprise — not explained by specific skills like math or raw power like high intelligence or endless hours thrown at the problem (perhaps to my relief). More important traits explaining success appeared to be open-mindedness, curiosity, carefulness, and the ability to be self-critical. Most interestingly people who believed they could become better — and constantly updated their forecasts — were significantly better at making accurate predictions. In fact, this tendency was a 3x better predictor of success than raw intelligence.

The traits of a Superforecaster

The better-performing forecasters did a number of things: broke large issues down into sub-problems, explored similarities and differences between their views and others, were especially careful not to overreact or underreact to new evidence, balanced under- and overconfidence, expressed their judgments on a scale of probability that was as fine-grained as possible, updated forecasts when new information emerged, and were able to change their minds. Each of these behaviors requires and deserves a closer look, and this is only a partial list, but the book does a great job going into detail on each of these key traits that “superforecasters” exhibit. Taking an example from the list, one of the worse decisions I have done in venture investing is highly associated with the inability to change my mind and underreacting as new information emerges. We were evaluating an investment into an innovative tech company that had many things going for it. Late in the investment process I discovered very negative background information on the CEO but underreacted on the new information and I was not able to change my mind. The investment was completed but never met our expectations due to leadership.

Not surprisingly, the best forecasters were also very good at managing their cognitive biases. We all have biases, and many times they are unconscious. My own example of a poor investment decision above is related to a bias called Belief Perseverance. That is the tendency for people to hold their beliefs as true, even when there is ample evidence to discredit the belief. When faced with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, people may choose to discredit, dismiss, misinterpret, or place little significance on the contradictory information. One bias I was not familiar with from before was highlighted a few times in the book called “attribute substitution.” This occurs when an individual makes a judgment (about a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes this to a more easily calculated heuristic attribute. In other words, we sometimes subconsciously substitute the (difficult) question at hand with a similar (easier to answer) question, and make our predictions based on that question instead, without necessarily realizing that we’ve made any substitution at all. Not only does this lead to cognitive biases, but the forecaster may be totally unaware that there are any biases at the root of their predictions

To summarize, be curious, careful, self-critical and keep an open mind. You can become better at making predictions and decisions but make sure you keep a check on cognitive biases. All in all, a highly recommended read for any decision maker in any industry — I enjoyed it a lot.

Our latest deal was announced in China just before GMIC Beijing last week. We led a 100M RMB Series B round for Shenzhen-based Yodo Run, China’s leading social sports and fitness tracking app. We have been following the rapidly growing sports and fitness market in China closely for some time as part of our investment strategy in digital health. We have concluded that there is a massive opportunity for a company like Yodo Run. Our managing partner in China, David Tang, who led the deal is joining the Yodo Run board, and we are excited to back the company and actively support its growth over the years to come. Here’s why:

Market inflection point — China is doing more fitness and sports

China is fast becoming the largest market for sports and fitness trackers in the world. The Chinese sports and fitness market was already worth around $216B in 2016, yet we believe there is a lot of room for growth because the Chinese sports industry accounts for less of the country’s GDP compared to other countries. The sports market also remains significantly under-commercialized, with sports services only accounting for around 20% of the overall sport industry (vs. nearly 60% in the US). We believe China’s sports market is at an inflection point and that we will see vast growth over the next few years.

Product innovation leadership from China

In the Western markets, traditional activity tracking apps have done well with the tracking functionality, but product innovation beyond tracking seems to have stalled. Yodo Run offers a wide range of innovative features like monetary incentive mechanisms for healthy behavior, a large social community leveraging virtual and in-person group leaders and coaches, offline events, and an ecommerce store to monetize and reward healthy behavior with gifts and discounts. Yodo Run also gives users accurate and actionable insights from the data it collects.

Exceptional metrics with rapid growth and high engagement

Yodo run is growing rapidly and engaging users. The company launched its mobile service in May 2014; it now has more than 100M registered users and more than 6M daily active users. Yodo Run’s 30-day retention is on par with social network industry leaders. Based on NGP’s experience in mobile consumer services, Yodo Run’s engagement and overall growth metrics are very compelling, showing that the company has been successful in acquiring and retaining users.

Brilliant team — Backgrounds from China’s Internet giants

The single most important investment criteria for NGP overall is the team. After identifying Yodo Run as a company with great potential, NGP reached out to Yodo Run’s CEO, Hu Maowei, via cold WeChat messages. After the first meeting, we were very impressed with his passion and resourcefulness. Maowei comes from Xunlei, one of China’s most popular movie streaming services, where he built up their mobile business, getting millions of users hooked with a great product experience. Before that, he was a founding member of Tencent’s mobile game distribution platform. Most of the other co-founders have worked with Maowei at Xunlei or Tencent, so it is a team that knows each other and has worked together before. Most importantly, this team has the deep domain expertize and passion to build a significant company.

We are proud to be backing a company that helps the Chinese population get healthier and more motivated to exercise!

Getting to 100M users in 3 years was originally published in NGP Capital Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am excited to announce that Christian Birk has joined NGP to work closely with our digital health team, supporting both new digital health investments and our digital health portfolio companies. We have made great strides into health investing during the past two years with many new investments, adding chronic care management company Vida Health, nutrition and health platform Lifesum, and female health company Clue to our portfolio, just to name a few.

Christian has been active in the health and fitness technology space for more than ten years. In 2007, he co-founded Endomondo, which became an industry-leading mobile application with a global user base of nearly 25 million registered users. It was also one of the world’s largest online social sports and fitness communities when it was acquired by Under Amour in 2015. I guess that was when I heard of Christian the first time. We have since met in a variety of different settings, and I have always been very impressed by Christian’s creative thinking and leadership skills. In January, during health-related events surrounding the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, we decided to work together.

Recently, Christian shared his thoughts with me on the digital health space and the opportunities he sees at NGP.

“I’m excited about the adventure at NGP. As an entrepreneur in residence at a VC, it’s very interesting to now be sitting on the other side of the table. I’ve been passionate about fitness and health my entire life and was an elite runner in my home country early in my career. Over the years this passion has become increasingly digital. We have only seen the first few layers of how lifestyle changes enabled by technology and preventive measures can play a big role in the overall health care space. I hope to bring a user-centric perspective to NGP.

Joining the digital health team at NGP gives me the opportunity to work with a group of knowledgeable and passionate investors, as well as meeting smart and motivated entrepreneurs who are on a path to improving the world for patients, care givers, recreational users and healthcare systems. Over the next months, I’ll take some deep dives into a few of the many areas of the broader digital health landscape.”

I believe Christian can add tremendous value as part of our digital health team. And did I mention that Christian is a former elite runner who once held the Danish national record in the 400-meter dash? I am looking forward to working more closely with you, @endobirk !

Christian Birk, co-founder of Endomondo, joins us as an Entrepreneur In Residence to support NGP’s… was originally published in NGP Capital Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Digital health is happening now. At NGP, my team and I firmly believe that healthcare is going to be transformed due to the widespread adoption of mobile devices and wearables that enable a completely new way of collecting and analyzing health-related data. Preventive healthcare is going to take a bigger role as more health data is digitalized and it can be analyzed and transformed into actionable recommendations improving outcomes at lower costs. According to its recent mHealth report, research firm Ketchum found that nearly 60 percent of U.S. smartphone owners already use mobile devices to manage their health and wellbeing, and we expect this trend to continue driving further digitalization of healthcare.

NGP recently led a $20 million Series B investment in Clue, a fertility and cycle tracker service. By empowering women to track and discover patterns in their cycle, Clue leverages mobile technology to help women better understand their bodies. Female health is an important topic that has tremendous impact on general health. For example, according to an estimate by WHO, modern contraceptive use by 300 million women across the 69 focus countries averted an estimated 82 million unintended pregnancies, 25 million unsafe abortions, and 124,000 maternal deaths in 2016.” We believe that over time digital services can have an impact of similar magnitude on female health as contraceptive use. However, the premise that technology and smart product design can be leveraged to improve female health is an area that has not received a lot of attention in the technology industry to date but there is a tremendous opportunity to innovate.

During our first meeting almost two years ago when Clue consisted of just a few employees working out of Berlin’s hip Kreuzberg district, we saw something unique in the company’s mission to support reproductive health with a digital solution and we were impressed with the user experience of their service, so we started following the company closely. Since then, Clue has attracted capital from leading investors, built their team and expanded their active user base to a more than 5 million strong community.

Our decision to support Clue and lead a new financing round was driven by three primary factors:

#1. The Opportunity

Clue serves a huge market, addressing issues that concern half of the world’s population during most of their lifetime. However, as female health and topics like family planning is not a matter that should be limited to only females themselves, the company also launched Clue Connect — a way to allow users to connect and share insights with partners and others close ones. As global investors with presence in India, China, Europe and the United States, we strongly believe that Clue is a company that can have a global impact by offering a digital solution that is accessible to the growing smartphone population everywhere.

#2. The Solution

Clue is offering a best-in-class user experience through a predictive calendar that gives you an idea of when your next period is about to start. An average user puts in around 40 data points each month — ranging from parameters such as pain and emotions to sleep and exercise — and the solution identifies patterns and offers personalized suggestions for users. Clue’s strong engagement metrics stand out in comparison to other mobile services and confirm that the easy-to-use service offers value -long term.

#3. The Team

Clue is led by a visionary founding team. Ida Tin, the CEO, has surrounded herself with a capable team and active stakeholders and built an impressively mission-driven organization that puts the user at the center of everything it does.

Clue is primed to lead the market based on its mission driven team and best-in-class solution. We are privileged to join the Clue family and look forward to supporting the team’s continued efforts to build solutions for female health, globally.

Investing in Female Health was originally published in NGP Capital Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article was co-authored with John Gardner @NGP_VC

As obesity and leading a sedentary lifestyle has become more common across the western world, the consequences have started to show at scale. Preventable diseases have become more common, and in fact, the World Health Organization predicts that as much as 20% of the causes of deaths today are attributable to diseases that were either preventable in the first place or could have been managed to prolong life expectancy. More than 400,000 people die each year in the United States as a direct result of obesity and sedentary lifestyle, and perhaps that same amount again is attributable to heart disease, hypertension, and type two diabetes.

Preventative medicine and chronic care management programs have been developed over the years that clinically prove the ability to meaningfully reduce the onset of disease among those at risk, as well as minimize impact and avoid hospitalization or excessive intervention among those who are already experiencing the disease. Yet the impact of these programs has historically been quite small, as morbidity rates continue, and hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year to manage chronic care for those who develop these diseases.

Changes may be on the horizon, however. Governments, employers and healthcare systems are faced with the fact that they simply cannot afford to cover the costs associated with treating these diseases over such a broad percentage of the population or for such long periods of time. These organizations are investing real dollars into carrot and stick incentive programs in an effort to get patients who are at risk into some preventative care program. Regulatory changes are enabling new services that focus on cost reduction, creating new revenue streams through incentives and mandatory compliance which is pushing the focus to overall health and preventative care. As society starts to embrace the economics behind paying for outcomes versus transactions, incentive program will become more aligned with wellness and preventative measures as well. And, consumers themselves are becoming more empowered to take control of their own health and wellbeing — the concept that, their own behavioural change can be as important a part of managing health as is a visit to the doctor.

At NGP, we look at the chronic care continuum as having three core categories: health and fitness (pre-prevention), prevention of chronic conditions, and clinical care of chronic diseases. From fitness applications designed to help consumer improve their eating habits or track their achievements, to specific tools to help manage blood sugar or stress levels, to an advanced application that gives offsite access to critical patient information, the next generation of chronic care innovations will be the epicentre of the digital health era.

While the audience and distribution channel, for each chronic care category varies, the success factors for any program remain the same:

• Digital health innovators need to be able to show a demonstrable impact on improved outcomes across a broad sample of the target population;
• Even in the most clinical settings, the program has to be easy to use for the patient/consumer
• Programs need to operate in a way that seamlessly integrates with provider and health system workflows
• Programs need to include meaningful human interaction/coaching in order to sustain engagement over a long period of time
• Programs need to have some measure of positive social re-enforcement in the manner of a classic 12 step program.

At NGP, we are very excited about the ways that entrepreneurs and innovators are leveraging new and cheaper technologies to be able to extend the reach and efficacy of programs, and do so on a scalable basis. Proliferation of low cost sensors, passive collection of increasingly accurate data, cloud based analytics, mobile tools for caregivers, remote patient management, artificial intelligence, tele-care and bot-based compliance re-enforcement- all these recent developments create opportunities to significantly increase the capabilities of new preventative medicine and chronic care management programs. Employer and regulatory driven initiatives are creating the economic pull-thru required to fund outreach and incentivize adoption by the population most in need. We are funding and will continue to fund companies that can impact the outcomes of individuals and populations across the Chronic Care Continuum.

Disclaimer: Chronic Care Continuum landscape visual includes NGP portfolio companies

The Chronic Care Continuum was originally published in NGP Capital Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Having actively looked at number of digital health companies over the past 24 months, I am happy to announce that we have led an investment in Lifesum, a mobile nutrition management company out of Stockholm, Sweden. We are excited about the space and being part of Lifesum’s journey to make it simple for people everywhere to live healthier.

A large and attractive market for personalized health

According to the WHO, worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980 — there are already more than 1.9 billion overweight adults in the world, over 600 million of whom are considered obese. Being overweight or obese is a major risk factor in a wide range of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke, diabetes, arthritis and certain cancers, according to the same report.

We believe personalized nutrition management and coaching offers an enormous opportunity to help people take better care of themselves. Together with regular exercise and sleep, weight management through proper nutrition can help prevent some serious chronic conditions. Furthermore, having followed the development of the mobile ecosystem of the past 10 years, we are convinced that the increased usage and stickiness of smartphones will make mobile the right channel for delivering personalized health services.

With an established, growing business serving 15 million users, Lifesum is well positioned to become the leading service for helping people establish healthier lifestyle habits as it continues to innovate its mobile subscription service and engage people in their personal health.

An experienced team with a great vision

Aware of the challenges of building a nutrition coaching solution that retains high customer engagement and help users achieve real-life goals, we knew we needed to find an A-class team to back. During our meetings with Lifesum’s management, we realized that we had not only found a team with an extensive experience from scaling of online business at Spotify and Stardoll, but also a team that shared our vision of a holistic and user-friendly coaching platform.

Lifesum’s strength lies in its great design and branding capabilities — already recognized by major players like Apple, Google and Samsung. Lifesum breaks down major — sometimes overwhelming — goals, such as losing weight, into smaller and more manageable bites. What I have learned from investing in other mobile services like mobile gaming companies is that metrics-driven product development is the key to long term usage. I think many consumer services have still plenty to learn from the gaming companies in this area and there are enormous benefits to unlock by applying those methods to other verticals such as digital health. As the team continues to perfect the Lifesum user experience, we are confident it will help users increase their likelihood of achieving targeted, real-life results. Similarly, we think that the use of artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology can lower the need for manual efforts by the user, further increasing the convenience of such a service.

Betting on a healthier future

The time for digital healthcare is now and as the food consumption vertical is also undergoing a massive transformation through digitalization we expect to see a lot of innovation in the cross section of these two areas. I am excited to join the Board and be part of the Lifesum journey. The greatest opportunity for growth is still ahead thanks to the exciting product roadmap the team is working on. Now is the time to help people live healthier lives through personalized nutrition.

Lifesum — Helping people live healthier lives was originally published in NGP Capital Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.