Generative AI models have demonstrated to app developers that combining a robust knowledge base with the right model can enable them to offer users services -- once reliant on costly professionals like therapists or executive assistants -- at a fraction of the price. Former VP of product at fitness company Whoop, Rami Alhamad, has a similar take on nutrition with his new app Alma.
The iOS app, launching for users in North America today, is a well-designed app with a calorie tracker and a nutrition guide with an AI layer on top of it.
Alhamad thinks that fitness apps like MyFitnessPal make nutrition tracking tedious, with users having to manually search for dishes and input them for different types of meals. Instead, he thinks you should just talk to (or type to) Alma's AI assistant about what you ate, and the app will figure out the portions and calorie intake through estimates. You can adjust these measures after the app shows you calorie count as well.
Alternatively, you can take a photo of your meal, and the AI algorithm will identify dishes for you. Such features are already available in apps like Kholsa-backed Healthify and YC-backed Snapcalorie. However, Alma is banking on its design, variety of input methods, and ease of use as key drivers for growth.
Besides calorie tracking, you can ask the AI assistant to suggest meals to meet your goals of fiber and protein intake. Plus, you can upload a menu picture and ask the AI assistant to recommend suitable items according to your goal.
The app also gives you a score, which is based on what you ate on a particular day in terms of calories and macros. The app uses that score to give you tips on improving your diet.
What's more, as you chat more with the AI assistant in the app, it learns your preferences and gives you suggestions accordingly. You can see these insights in your profiles and edit them as well.
The company expects to make money through a monthly subscription of $19 or an annual subscription of $199.
Alhamad, who built a sports tech startup called Push and eventually sold it to Whoop, told TechCrunch he was thinking of doing something new in the area of health and nutrition after exiting Whoop in 2022. According to him, while there are trackers for workouts and sleep, there isn't a practical solution to tracking nutrition.
"For the last 10 years of my life, I have constantly gained and lost weight. I have spent a long time on apps like MyFitnessPal, typing stuff to track my food intake. When ChatGPT came around, just like a lot of other people, I started using it for meal planning and kitchen support. However, it wasn't personalized. So last year, after I left Whoop, I started thinking about this problem," Alhamad said.
Alhamad, who became an entrepreneur in residence at Menlo Ventures to build Alma, believes that in the consumer space, there will be specialized companies using AI that focus on only one topic. The startup has raised $2.9 million from Menlo Ventures and Anthropic until now.
On the technical front, the company is using a mix of models to get results. Alma noted that it is using knowledge from Harvard Nutrition to fetch answers. The company said it has several people on staff focusing on nutritional knowledge to expand its data set. Alhamad said that the startup also wants to look beyond the U.S. to bring health knowledge from around the world.
The Alma team would like to build on food discovery in the app as well. Currently, you can ask for recipes and get answers from the AI assistant, but you can't save them for future reference. The app wants to auto-populate food suggestions based on your goals and preferences. Plus, it will also have a way to cook food easily from what you have in the pantry.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude can already do a lot of those things, but the friction for the user is that you have to prompt them correctly with context each time. Apps like Alma are trying to take away the headache of writing long prompts through app features. Samsung's Food app gained some features like pantry tracking and recipe suggestions based on the items that you have in the house last year.
Shawn Carolan, a partner at Menlo VC, said that ease of entering your food intake makes Alma an attractive solution.
"If I eat 20 things in a day, it's tough to record each one of them by trying to find them in a list. With Alma, you can just talk to it and register all of that quickly. If something took you 30 seconds and a new app reduces that to just a few seconds, it becomes a key usage driver," Carolan said.
He added that right now, plenty of people are not consulting a nutritionist, and Alma can give them easy access to that kind of information.
"People are spending thousands of dollars a month to get injections to lose weight. So the question is, if you had this perfect nutritionist in your pocket who could help you with your goal, maybe you can take a drug-free approach to achieving your health goals," Carolan said.
