Noom’s flagship product is the Weight Loss Coach, which is a top weight loss app for Android. It acts as a “weight loss coach in your pocket” by setting daily wight loss tasks, tracking and grading progress, and adjusting goals accordingly. Other products include CardioTrainer and Calorific, and are all intended to make healthy living an integrated and enjoyable part of everyday life.

Noom was founded as WorkSmart Labs in 2006 in New York and since then has helped users lose over 20 million pounds. The Weight Loss Coach costs $9.99 a month and was popular enough with customers that it did not seek out institutional financing until it raised a seed round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers in 2011.

Behind the US and the UK, Korea is Noom’s biggest market. This $2.6 million “pre-Series A” and will help open the Noom Korea marketing office and launch a fully localized Noom in Korean. The first two rounds of angel funding the company received were from Korean investors and the giant food corporation Daesang licensed Calorific on the Korean market last year as a trial.

Noom currently has over 15 million installs and plans to continue international expansion, as well as make additions to the product line and mobile offerings. This round was led by m8 Capital, a London-based investment firm that focuses exclusively on mobile technology. Qualcomm Ventures and Harbor Pacific Capital also invested. Noom is headquartered in New York City.  Read the press release.  

All eyes are on healthcare technology startups, but the space is still treated with caution by angel investors and the venture capital community alike.

Most investors don’t have the specialized knowledge to understand the pain-points that doctors and healthcare providers face, and many will not see return on investment in three to five years, the period they are typically willing to wait. It takes a special kind of investor to fund a health tech company.

New York-based online trading platform SecondMarket may have a solution to the problem, as part of its broader plan to stimulate investors’ interest in verticals like healthcare and education. SecondMarket’s members are used to buying up shares in consumer-focused companies like Twitter and Foursquare.

“Our members might be interested [in a space] from a macro-perspective, but they don’t feel comfortable enough to deploy capital,” said Jeremy Smith, SecondMarket’s CSO in a phone interview.

The company has teamed up with digital health accelerator Startup Health for the month of December to offer its members’ access to white papers and webinars produced by independent parties, and curated by Startup Health.

Since its inception in 2011, Startup Health has enrolled 23 startups in its intensive three-year program. The program favors companies that have already raised a small seed round, and offers them mentorship and a professional network to maximize their chances of success.

“You can’t expect our members to put in capital and hope for the best,” said Smith.”We’ve created a program to help them get educated.”

SecondMarket’s investors are encouraged to pour thousands of dollars into promising health tech startups, as well as Startup Health’s new fund. According to a document available to SecondMarket’s network of accredited investors, Startup Health is building up a $7.5 million Innovation Fund to support up to 100 digital health and wellness startups. The new fund will take a 2 to 10 percent equity stake in each startup.

The hope is that this will provide health tech entrepreneurs with sufficient capital to test the market opportunity, and in a position to raise venture funding later down the line.

Healthcare image // lenetstan, Shutterstock 

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