SnapCalorie Raises $2 Million in Seed Funding from Y Combinator
Summary
SnapCalorie, a personal health management startup, has raised $2 million from Y Combinator in a seed round. The Great Falls, Va., startup has developed artificial intelligence technology to measure calories in any meal based on a single photo.Wade Norris, a former Google AI engineer, former Raytheon and MathWorks engineer Scott Baron and some others at Googles moonshot project called X are among the co-founders of SnapCalorie, which has previously raised $125,000 from unidentified investors in a pre-seed round.SnapCalorie claims its app, which lets users take a photo of any meal and get an accurate calorie count, is more precise than a trained nutritionist. At the heart of its technology is an algorithm that was outlined in an academic paper whose co-authors include Norris.We introduce Nutrition5k, a novel dataset of 5k diverse, real world food dishes with corresponding video streams, depth images, component weights, and high accuracy nutritional content annotation, they said in the paper. We demonstrate the potential of this dataset by training a computer vision algorithm capable of predicting the caloric and macronutrient values of a complex, real world dish at an accuracy that outperforms professional nutritionists.An enabler of SnapCalories technology is Roboflow, which has developed advanced computer vision systems. Roboflow claims its technology helps SnapCalorie speed up model prototyping by 1,200% and decrease labeling time by 80%.Norris attended Y Combinator and was a technical lead in Google AIs team that started Google Lens and Cloud Vision API.