Weilos, The YC-Backed Weight Loss Startup, Has Been Acquired By Weight Watchers

We Asked Rock Health Founder Halle Tecco About The Future Of Digital Medicine
Weilos, the startup that runs an online community for people interested in fitness and weight loss, has been acquired by Weight Watchers, TechCrunch has learned.
According to a source, the purchase price is in the single-digit millions. The startup seems to be relatively small as far as staff goes, as LinkedIn lists two current full-time employees at the company.
Weilos first launched out of startup accelerator Y Combinator back in August 2013 as a marketplace for pairing up people who want to lose weight with online fitness coaches who have had their own weight loss successes. A little over a year ago, the company pivoted to focus on being a social media platform on the web and iOS for people to talk about their weight loss and fitness goals, track their food intake and activity, and share selfies of their progress.
At the time of the pivot back in January 2014, Weilos’ founder and CEO Ray Wu, who has an M.D. from Cornell Medical School, told TechCrunch that his research indicated that the average person who posted progress photos lost 1.2 lbs per week compared to 0.27 lbs for people who use Weight Watchers.
It now seems that Weight Watchers itself wants in on some of that action. A Weight Watchers spokesperson today confirmed via email that the company has acquired Weilos, and sent along the following statement from Weight Watchers CTO Dan Crowe:
“Weilos is one of the highest rated apps in the Apple app store with an average rating of five stars and users praising the motivation, encouragement and support they find in the Weilos community. This strategically important acquisition will accelerate the product and technology development of the social networking and community capabilities that Weight Watchers members are looking for.”
This isn’t the first M&A move that Weight Watchers has made in the Silicon Valley startup space in recent months. Back in April 2014, the company acquired Wello, the Rock Health-backed app for connecting people with personal trainers.

By: Unknown On 01:29

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YC-Backed Notable Labs Provides Personalized Medical Testing For Brain Cancer Patients

Skype, Get Your Shit TogetherMatt de Silva was working as a hedge fund manager with Thiel Capital in the fall of 2013 when he got the news that his dad had brain cancer — specifically, a Glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer.
There are very few treatment options for this type of cancer. de Silva’s father was told he had about 3-6 months to live even with chemo and radiation therapy. Most patients live 15 months with this kind of cancer.
It was a devastating blow, but de Silva was determined to find a better option for his dad. A bit of research into alternatives gave him an idea. He could use the known molecular structures of a combination of already approved drugs to fight the aggressive tumor mutations.
“It became apparent to me that doctors and patients are open to this approach, but lack enough data to implement it,” he said.
This convinced de Silva to pair up with his running buddy and pre-med student Pete Quinzio to found the Y Combinator-backed Notable Labs, a personalized testing service for brain cancer patients that prioritizes combinations of FDA-approved treatments that can be immediately prescribed by a doctor.
Normally, an idea like this wouldn’t be scalable. The process would be long and expensive, and there wouldn’t be enough data to start with. It takes an average of 12 years and $2.9 billion to put a new drug on the shelf, and even then, most of these types of tumors mutate, leaving the drugs ineffective in future treatments.
Notable Labs cuts down on the guesswork and testing time in the lab with the use of predictive analytics from another YC-backed startup, Atomwise. It then uses a customized machine that can test thousands of combinations of drugs within the lab in a short amount of time.
It became apparent to me that doctors and patients are open to this approach, but lack enough data to implement it.— Matt de Silva, Notable Labs co-founderBy August 2014, Notable Labs had raised some capital from Founders Fund, First Round Capital and Steve Case’s nonprofit Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure; hired its first scientist from UCSF; and set up a rented lab hidden on the first floor of an office building in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco.
During a tour of the lab, de Silva showed me the rented desk space and the millions of dollars worth of lab equipment at his disposal throughout the shared lab. Then he steered me into a bio storage room with a custom-made machine that runs on Python to show me how it all works.
One of the scientists donned blue rubber gloves and was working with dishes of tumor cells inside a glassed-off testing area. de Silva pulled out a clear box filled with red liquid from a refrigerator in the corner of the room. The box was the size of a Tupperware sandwich case.
“See those tiny, floating specs in the liquid? Those are my dad’s tumor cells,” he told me.
de Silva explained how brain cancer cells and their various mutations make ideal subjects for testing. “They grow quickly and readily in three dimensions as spheroids, simulating actual tumors,” he said.
Testing can be done in various mutations, and myriad combined drugs can be updated for the individual patient on the fly using the Notable Labs method.
de Silva then pulled out a black carton punctured with tiny squares and explained how the liquid and cells get dropped into each square. The cells float to the bottom and are put into the special machine for a series of tests. Various mixtures of drugs are added to each square to see what works the best on that particular tumor. Combinations of each drug are then prioritized for efficacy, safety and tumor penetration and then sent to the patient’s doctor to evaluate.
Notable Labs is exclusively focused on brain cancer treatments right now. There are various reasons for this, but the biggest for de Silva is the fact that brain cancer patients have so few alternative options at the moment.
Unfortunately Notable Labs could not find a combination quickly enough to save de Silva’s dad. He succumbed to his brain cancer a week and a half ago, exactly 15 months since his diagnosis.
I asked de Silva how he was able to carry on with a fledgling startup so soon after losing his father. He told me with a sense of purpose in his voice that he was more determined than ever to find a better option of treatment for cancer patients like his dad.

By: Unknown On 01:30

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YC-Backed EquipmentShare Is Like Airbnb For Construction Equipment

Uber And Lyft Urge Users To Share Rides With Other Passengers During SXSWIn today’s world it seems there are fewer and fewer industries exist where there isn’t some sort of peer-to-peer model emerging for access to the goods needed to get a job done. Every segment is creating its own “Airbnb for X,” which you can attribute to a growing acceptance that as we all become connected, there’s little reason for each of us to own all the same stuff when we could just borrow what we need from a neighbor.
Apparently that theory even holds true for the construction industry, where a little startup called EquipmentShare is making it easier for construction crews to make rent equipment they don’t own from other contractors, while also allowing them to make money off their own idle gear.
Contractors can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a piece of equipment they might need for one job, and then have it sit idle for months or years while waiting for the next job that they’ll get to use it. Otherwise, they might have to shell out thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars a month to rent the same gear from a nearby equipment rental company.
The company was founded by brothers Willy and Jabbok Schlacks, who have been in the construction industry for more than 20 years and grew tired of facing the constant buy-versus-rent conundrum when it came to the equipment they needed. They were joined by Jeff Lowe, Matthew McDonald, and Brad Siegler, all of which are from the Missouri area.
Construction equipment rental is a $40 billion a year industry. But according to Willy Schlacks, contractors own about three times the amount of construction equipment that is owned by the rental companies. That means there’s a ton — literally, no pun intended — of excess inventory for contractors to take advantage of, if only there were a more efficient way for them to connect with one another.
EquipmentShare hopes to provide a platform for contractors to find that unused equipment, while also enabling them to make money off assets they own that are otherwise sitting idle.
To do so, the company has created an easy way for customers to post and describe their available equipment and set a rental price for it. For renters, the EquipmentShare platform provides a way to hunt for the equipment they need from others nearby. To ensure that everything goes as planned, the platform also handles all payment processing.
Because contractors are renting out equipment that is not being used, EquipmentShare prices are typically at least 30 percent below the price you would pay to a traditional rental company. However, since the platform provides the same sort of two-sided rating system as Airbnb and other peer-to-peer platforms, there’s an incentive for equipment to be well-maintained, and for contractors to not abuse the gear they’re renting.
In that way, EquipmentShare is hoping to provide a better experience than other peer-to-peer alternatives out there — mainly Craigslist, which is how many contractors find equipment to rent today. But when it comes to providing a peer-to-peer marketplace for this type of equipment, there are a number of hurdles to overcome, such as verifying the identity and licenses of contractors, while also insuring against damage to equipment that is rented out.
While limited only to the Missouri market currently, EquipmentShare hopes to be able to be in more markets soon. As part of Y Combinator, the team is paying attention to how other peer-to-peer services expanded their businesses, although Schlacks admits that there’s not a ton of overlap between his construction startup and a lot of the other software-type businesses that go through the program.
That said, where there’s a huge market opportunity — and construction rental is one — there’s usually a way for technology to make it more efficient. EquipmentShare hopes to provide the platform for doing so.

By: Unknown On 07:05

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YC-Backed Valor Water Helps Utilities Keep The Water Running

You Can Now Embed Twitter Video On Your WebsiteDisrupt Battlefield finalist Valor Water is graduating out of Y Combinator just in time to help solve the world’s water crisis. Valor provides a suite of business-intelligence tools for water utilities.
In a drought, consumers are encouraged to conserve water and they often do. In California this past December, conservation was up from 10 percent in November to 22 percent in December, in year-over-year water-use comparisons done by the State of California. Since July 2014, consumers saved 134 billion gallons of water or enough to supply 1.8 million residents with water for a year.
But with that conservation comes a challenge for utilities: decreasing revenue. For every gallon conserved in a drought, that’s one more gallon a utility is not earning money on, over time putting the provider in a very precarious financial situation. Utilities, fearing for their survival, often end up issuing rate hikes to maintain revenue. This leads to a cycle whereby consumers are no longer incentivized to conserve, as they’ll end up paying the same water bill regardless.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Valor founder Christine Boyle has long been familiar with the role water plays in society. She explains that whether you live in an urban or rural community, are trying to grow food or want basic sanitation, “if you don’t have access to water, you probably have a pretty poor quality of life.”
It is this sentiment that brought her to University of North Carolina where she pursued her doctorate. Like most water scholars, Boyle began her studies focused on water quality and wastewater management.
In 2007, everything changed. A major drought hit the Southeast United States causing North Carolina and Tennessee to experience the driest year on record. The drought led to restricted water use for citizens, extremely low reservoir levels, damaged crops, limited energy supply from regional hydro and nuclear power and went so far as to cause conflict between states trying to claim ownership of what few water resources existed.
For every gallon conserved in a drought, that’s one more gallon a utility is not earning money on, over time putting the provider in a very precarious financial situation.
With all of this, Boyle saw local utilities struggling to stay afloat. Conservation efforts had caused the City of Charlotte to lose $19 million that year. Even smaller utilities were coming up $1-2 million short of their expected revenue. Their only solution was to increase rates on the customer in hopes of maintaining their ability to provide water.
It was at that time in her PhD that Boyle began working with local utilities to find alternative financial strategies that could help them weather the crisis. She began analyzing utility data to more effectively segment their users and understand consumption at a more granular level, leading to targeted rate adjustment and pricing tiers that were more efficient. They also highlighted customers with potential leaks, broken meters or mis-reads, leading to potential “hidden” revenue.
In the years that followed, Boyle continued to consult for U.S. water agencies while completing a Fulbright Fellowship in China, also focused on financial water management. When she returned to the U.S., the demand for her services continued to rise.
“Originally, I didn’t think of the services I was providing as a product,” Boyle explains. But as a consultant, she added, you are usually involved with a utility over several months, typically on a project basis, and often are brought in too late in the game to make significant improvements. Ultimately, utilities need a tool they can be using in their day-to-day operations.
That’s when Boyle began to create Valor Water Analytics. The company first had to secure the right to use the technology from UNC and today has a non-transferrable, global license from the university for the financial tools Boyle developed as a graduate student.
We first heard from Valor in the Battlefield at Disrupt SF this past fall when it launched its Drought Conversation Toolkit. Today, it added additional backing from both Y Combinator and ImagineH20 accelerator programs.
Valor’s West Coast location puts the company in a good position to expand. Since launch, the team has brought four California utilities on-board with its system including the Sonoma County Water Agency. With this customer, they have released a case study to assist others in the water space understand the planning process.
Valor has worked quickly to diversify its product offerings. On top of the Drought Toolkit, Valor now offers four additional products as part of their subscription service — Hidden Revenue Generator, Water Revenue Profiles, SMART Targets and Cutoff Analyzer. These tools enable more detailed customer segmentation, water consumption and payment trends. The Cutoff Analyzer allows utilities to model the impact of proposed future rate changes on their customers to predict how behavior and thus revenue could change.
Using Valor, existing utility customers have experienced an average of 6 percent net revenue increase and are using that money to invest in infrastructure and ensure water continues to be affordable to communities.

By: Unknown On 22:50

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YC-Backed Kickback Offers An Easy Way To Play Minecraft Competitively

Asus Republic Of Gamers G751 Review: Portable Gaming, Emphasis On The ‘Gaming’
From Starcraft to League of Legends, the e-sports market has gone through a massive expansion over the last decade in a half. Millions of dollars are now at stake over video games played in front of audiences of thousands, both at live events and in matches broadcast online.
Y Combinator-backed Kickback is looking to expand the scope of that market by building competitive ecosystems around pre-existing games. Its initial release is built upon Minecraft, the adventure toolbox now owned by Microsoft.
Kickback’s approach treats the entire experience as one product. While the games take place within the Minecraft app, the startup runs servers hosting the matches, arranges games, designs the “maps” games take place in, codifies the rules of each map type and keeps track of player wins and losses.
The server architecture is based on the work done for Triangle, a free server hosting service Kickback created for the Minecraft community last summer. More than 200,000 servers have been hosted on Triangle since its launch, bringing in a healthy number of players for the team to test its primary platform.
Minecraft is rather easy to modify with new weapons, rules, and maps, so Kickback has a fine level of control over the the kind of matches it can implement. Matches can range from two to tens of players, with different rules for deathmatch-style play and team-based combat. Volunteers from the community contribute maps for different player counts and match types, letting the startup add new venues to play in at a faster rate than most studios can crank out downloadable content.
As with Triangle, Kickback’s matchmaking system is offered free to those who just want to play for bragging rights. The startup plans to make money from players willing to bet actual money they’re better than other players. For $1 per match, confident Minecraft players can pitch in to a pot for a chance to win money in ten to twenty minutes.
These paid matches offer just as much variety as the free options, though the number of competitors obviously affects the potential payout. Kickback co-founder Vlad Nov says that paid dynamic has helped the startup in two ways.
First, there’s the unique experience that comes with having some money on the line during a competitive game, making each match feel a bit more exciting. There’s also the fact that the game’s biggest winners have also tended to be the most vocal activists, recruiting more friends to play on the platform than the free players who might just see Kickback as a convenient way to get their Minecraft fix but could otherwise find servers elsewhere.
On the topic of bringing in the community, Kickback’s other co-founder, Mark Prokoudine, says the startup is looking at the aspects of the Minecraft community that make it unique. They’ve made a promotional video in partnership with one of the community’s most popular animators (which you can see a preview of in the GIF below) which they plan to release in concert with a popular Twitch streamer in the weeks to come.
To take advantage of the massive amount of attention Twitch can bring to a game or event, the startup is also working to let users jump into Twitch streams for current matches from within the web app, making it a destination both for playing and watching others play each other.

Going forward, the 10-person startup’s two biggest focuses are adding more maps and match types for Minecraft and bringing other games to the platform. It won’t have some of the advantages that came with Minecraft when it starts working with new games, but Prokoudine says that the hardest work — making the scalable backend and matchmaking systems — was designed to carry over without much of a hassle.
Featured Image: Kickback0
SHARES0Share0Tweet0Share0000AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBaseY CombinatorFounded2005  OverviewY Combinator is a startup accelerator based in Mountain View, CA.In 2005, Y Combinator developed a new model of startup funding. Twice a year they invest a small amount of money ($14-20k + an $80k safe) in a large number of startups (most recently 68). The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months. The YC partners work closely with each company to get them into the best possible shape and refine …LocationMountain View, CaliforniaCategoriesStartups, Venture Capital, Finance, ConsultingFoundersJessica Livingston, Paul GrahamWebsitehttp://www.ycombinator.comFull profile for Y CombinatorMinecraftDescriptionMinecraft is a sandbox indie game about breaking and placing blocks.Minecraft allows its players to make constructions out of textured cubes in a procedurally-generated 3D world. Other activities in the game include exploration, gathering resources, crafting, and combat. It has multiple gameplay modes, including survival modes where the player must acquire resources to build and maintain his or her …Websitehttp://minecraft.netFull profile for MinecraftMicrosoftFounded1974  OverviewMicrosoft is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics and personal computers and services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer web browser. Its flagship hardware products are Xbox game console and the Microsoft …y

By: Unknown On 21:20

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YC-Backed SigOpt Helps Customers Optimize Everything From Online Ads To Shaving Cream

in its name, but Clark said that SigOpt goes beyond A/B testing. Put (relatively) simply, it doesn’t just let you test different variations, but instead examines the data and recommends

By: Unknown On 22:57

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