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 Google’s 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.
Secret Sauce
“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 SnapCalorie’s technology is Roboflow, which has developed advanced “computer vision” systems. In Norris’ words, “Roboflow’s data management tools far surpassed any of the other tools we evaluated in the computer vision space.” SnapCalorie uses Roboflow’s technology for dataset management, labeling, annotation, managing label-only users from outside their organization, and training computer vision models for model-assisted labeling. Roboflow claims its technology helps SnapCalorie speed up model prototyping by 1,200% and decrease labeling time by 80%.
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Norris attended Y Combinator and was a technical lead in Google AI’s team that started Google Lens and Cloud Vision API. He is also the founder of Obico, formerly The Spaghetti Detective. That startup aimed to build smarter 3D printers using AI and computer vision.
Baron began his career in 2008 as an electrical engineering intern at BAE Systems, where he designed a Matlab program to simulate system performance and established requirements for a power distribution system. In 2009, he joined Raytheon, where he served as a senior engineer for its Space and Airborne Systems division. He later worked MathWorks before co-founding SnapCalorie.
Y Combinator, based in Mountain View, Calif., runs a startup accelerator program and invests in startups. Since 2005, it has placed over $700 million in about 5,000 startups, including Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash and Dropbox. It has made over 500 exits.
