Our chat feature will be down for maintenance on March 17, 2024, from approximately 2:00 AM – 3:00 AM ET.
Please check back after our maintenance has concluded, or submit a ticket to our email support if you require assistance.

Ready for a change? Learn More

Press Release: Former Uber Executive, Aaron Schildkrout, Joins Noom’s Board of Directors

by | Mar 15, 2018 | Last updated Sep 22, 2021


NEW YORKMarch 14, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Noom, the world’s leader in mobile health coaching, has announced that ex-Uber executive Aaron Schildkrout has joined its board.

Schildkrout joined Uber in 2015 as Head of Data; subsequently he led the Growth and Marketing team and later oversaw the development of Uber’s rider product and then its driver product. Before joining Uber, Schildkrout was the co-founder and CEO of HowAboutWe, an online dating and media company that sold to IAC in 2014.

“I’ve been working with the Noom team for five years as an advisor,” Schildkrout said. “During that time I’ve watched them innovate their way from a popular weight loss app into a genuinely game-changing mobile coaching solution that is poised to transform the treatment of chronic conditions, from weight loss to diabetes management. I’m thrilled to formally join the board to help the team grow and scale.”

Saeju Jeong, Noom’s co-founder and CEO, is excited for Schildkrout to utilize his extensive experience to help the company change the way the healthcare industry treats chronic conditions.

“Aaron will have an immediate impact on the company,” said Jeong. “Healthcare is ripe for disruption through Noom’s artificial intelligence and we’re excited to bring Aaron’s innovative ideas into the company. His experience with data, technology and marketing can help us leverage our massive user base to deliver the best AI and human coaching programs to millions in need.”

From Mobile Apps to AI-Assisted Human Coaching

Noom was started in late 2010, building AI-based applications to help people lose weight, diet and exercise. For years, Noom had top-grossing applications on the Google App store, winning awards and millions of downloads, but the health results were not as powerful as the team had expected.

In 2013 Noom experimented with combining human coaches with mobile technology, and immediately saw 4x better results – in weight loss, engagement, and other health measures. They spent the next three years perfecting the tech and increasing the number of patients each coach could handle, launching a fully-redesigned program in 2016.

Additionally, the team expanded its capabilities across the acuity spectrum, writing condition-specific curricula for weight loss, obesity, pre-diabetes, diabetes, pre-hypertension and hypertension.

The new product achieved unprecedented results (64 percent of participants losing 5 percent of body weight in just 16 weeks, as published in the British Medical Journal), and did it at a fraction of the price of in-person solutions. Demand for the new product has since taken off, in the U.S. and worldwide. Noom’s programs have been shown to be effective peer-reviewed studies appearing in journals such as Scientific Reports and The Journal of Human Hypertension; additionally, Noom’s diabetes prevention program (DPP) became the first mobile program recognized by the CDC.

“Once we truly nailed our product-market fit, I wanted to add more firepower to our board to help us grow, which is why Aaron was the perfect choice,” Jeong said.

“Aaron really knows how to manage a fast-moving enterprise. This past year saw explosive growth – 2017 revenue from our direct-to-consumer offerings increased 5x over 2016 and so far 2018 is expected to quadruple 2017’s results. Plus, we’re on track to hire an additional 200 behavior change coaches and will be building up our engineering team. Aaron will be an incredible resource as we scale the company.”

The Power Behind Noom: Data and AI

The secret to Noom’s effectiveness is in the data set Noom collects. As one of the world’s most popular weight loss programs, Noom continues to ingest an incredible amount of information about its customers’ daily habits, successes and failures. Noom‘s artificial intelligence was built atop four billion behavior pattern data points from over 47 million users. Noom’s machine learning engine is constantly gaining insights from the unbiased data about what works (and what doesn’t) so that its AI and human coaches can deliver the right guidance at the right time to achieve lasting behavior change.

Because Noom works with many healthcare enterprises, all data is stored is HIPAA-compliant and every member of the company is trained in how to handle PHI. Research studies use anonymized data to protect the identify of its users, and Noom follows industry best practices around privacy and security.

Noom is currently pushing ahead to leverage this data for a growing array of medical conditions, bringing its revolutionary technology deeper into the healthcare fold.

About Noom, Inc.

Noom, Inc., a leader in mobile health coaching, combines the power of technology with the empathy of real human coaches to deliver successful behavior change at scale. Noom’s direct-to-consumer weight loss and fitness mobile applications have reached more than 47 million users worldwide. Leveraging that success, Noom developed a behavior change platform to treat chronic and pre-chronic conditions, beginning with the CDC’s Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP). Noom’s is the first fully mobile diabetes prevention program to be recognized by the CDC and the only mobile program clinically proven in a peer-reviewed journal. Noom offers curricula across the acuity spectrum and now features programs for pre-hypertension, hypertension and diabetes management in addition to its flagship weight loss and diabetes prevention programs. Noom has offices in New York CitySeoul and Tokyo.