French startup Foodvisor launched in 2018 has raised a huge amount of $4.5 million funding round after generating 2 million downloads on the application store. Various angel investors are participating in this fund raising process. The Paris-based company Foodvisor has raised this huge amount to accelerate development of its nutritional coaching mobile app that uses artificial intelligence technology and computer vision to examine users’ eating habits.
The nutrition coach app is trying to help people improve their eating habits and reach their health goals. With this app broader breakthroughs in deep learning can be applied to realistic uses such as tracking food quantity intake in such a manner that it would have a considerable impact on people’s health. Initially the app was started as a project at a French engineering school where the 3 cofounders struggled with some basic questions.
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The questions asked by the cofounder are: “How can I eat better?” was the first question, said Foodvisor cofounder and chief marketing Officer Aurore Tran. “And how can I have clear nutritional facts about the food I eat?” she said.
To make things better in the app computer vision is also being applied to food by London-based Winnow, which also created a motion-sensing computer vision camera that can take food as it’s thrown into the trash to computerize waste tracking. In addition to computer vision feature the app is also focusing on targeting health concerns.
To enjoy the AI-driven food diary features of the app users can create an account and can take an image of their food before they are going to eat. The profound learning algorithm of the Foodvisor app can recognize approx. 1,200 types of food. It can also calculate the quantity of food and generate quick information on the possible nutritional breakdown. And in case the app makes a noticeable error, the app users can edit it, thus adding more relevant details that can enhance overall accuracy of the process.
Aurore Tran also revealed that the founders believed that image feature would give confidence to more people to track their daily calories intake. “We think we are solving a pain point with the pictures rather than uploading all of your data,” she said.
In addition to this, the app users even can sync their Foodvisor app with Apple’s Health app to calculate their physical activity into their general health monitoring and development toward goals. For this feature the company has developed some premium service for $5 to $10 per month that easily helps users to connect with skilled dietitians for individual advice.
For now the company is working on its product development, and to expand the company services in the U.S., which has its own set of challenges. The team is working continuously on various algorithms to identify trendy food items in the United States to integrate app with latest databases and other barcode repositories.
Still, this app is going to work in a country where a predictable 70% of the population is technically overweight. The French startup Foodvisor Company currently has only 15 employees and now is planning to double its team in large measure by focusing on the U.S. marketplace.
