Serial entrepreneur Max Levchin is known for cofounding PayPal and social gaming company Slide. Now he’s working on a very different problem.  With his Glow app, which is launching today on iOS, Levchin’s trying to help women (and their partners) who are trying to get pregnant. There’s an increasing need, as women are having children later in life and health insurance plans typically do not pay for expensive fertility treatments because they consider them “elective.”  Glow is also announcing today that it has raised about $6 million in financing led by Founders Fund with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.  There are a number of other apps with similar goals but Levchin believes Glow is different. With Glow, women enter in their personal information to start, as well as on a daily basis, and the app analyzes this data to give women an estimate of their fertility window via a calendar and an indication of the “% chance” of getting pregnant. Daily data that can be entered include morning temperature, vitamins and cervical mucus. The app also provides personalized stats and recommendations. The service includes a “companion” app for the woman’s partner.  Glow uses machine learning to anonymously analyze 9 to 15 data points per day from users with the aim of providing more accurate recommendations for everyone using the app. While this data problem is in theory easy, it gets very complex, Levchin says. Machine learning is his specialty from his past work at PayPal and Slide. “In reality it changes with stress, age, location, travel, nutrition,” he says. “Personalizing the fertility forecast is what we’re trying to do.”  Eventually, the company wants to move toward gathering data automatically from other devices, such as thermometers, scales and the like, so that people do not have to manually type in information every day. Levchin believes this trend of “wearable technology” or the quantified self will eventually become ubiquitous. (In fact, the avid cyclist had biked 120 miles the day before we met and he says he eagerly pours through the data he gets on his rides.)  In addition, to help women pay for fertility treatments, Glow has a non-profit fund called Glow First. Those who choose to participate pay $50 per month for 10 months into a pool with a cohort who joins at the same time. Those who do not conceive naturally after 10 months of actively using the Glow app will get money from the fund to pay for fertility treatment. They will get some amount greater than $500 that depends on how many people join the fund. To help seed the fund, Levchin has personally donated $1 million to the fund.  So why did Levchin and Glow cofounder Mike Huang choose pregnancy and fertility out of all the problems to tackle in health care? With pregnancy there is a less complicated relationship between the doctor, patient and insurance company, compared to other health problems like heart disease, they say. That’s because insurance companies don’t cover infertility treatments. That also creates a need for other solutions since treatment is so expensive.  But why health and not another gaming company? Levchin, who has two children, says he has nothing against gaming companies but his interests have changed. “Not to judge the games industry but games are all fundamentally about postponing fear of mortality,” he says. (He describes this analytically, not morbidly.) “Playing games, the number one benefit you get is you put aside the notion that ultimately things will end badly for you. The only real cure is to have children… The only way you find this out is once you have your own kids. You can see, I’m meant to procreate. Now that I have children I can see that my genetic make-up will move forward.”  Levchin acknowledges that this is heavy stuff, but he describes it in a very analytical way. Ultimately, he’s attempting something difficult: he’s trying to bring data analysis to a very intimate and human problem.
Max Levchin, the cerebral former cofounder and CTO of PayPal and cofounder of Slide, is back with a mobile app to help women get pregnant.