Startup Spotlight: Ommyx

Startup Spotlight is an interview series where we ask health, fitness and wellness startups that use Terra, to share their wisdom from their own journey to success and also where they see fitness data going in the future.

In this Spotlight, we connected with David Mehlman, founder and CEO of Ommyx, the app that provides users with analytics powered by AI-models to empower them to make better decisions for their health and performance. David built Ommyx when he realised that there was a desperate need for personalised recommendations from all the health and wellness information available. Too much of the current info out there is ‘one-size-fits-all' and often doesn't apply to individual situations. He's optimistic about the future and believes that there will be massive advancements in hardware and software, and that health and performance data will be tracked completely unintrusively.

Describe your company:

David Mehlman (DM): The Ommyx app provides users with an analytical tool that empowers better decisions for their health and performance. Our proprietary, AI-driven models craft recommendations from health and fitness data that help users live a longer, healthier, and higher performing life. These recommendations meet users where they are and take into account their history, personality, circumstance, and goals.

How did you come up with the idea?

DM: I spent most of my adult life working in finance. I spent over 100 hours per week in front of Excel models, ate most of my meals at my desk, did not exercise at all, and paid little to no attention to my health and wellness. That all changed a few years ago. I was tired all the time. I slept poorly. Aches and pains were popping up. I knew I had to do something and was determined to take control of my health and improve my lifestyle. But I had no idea where to start.

And the wellness industry is a mess. I was faced with confusing, conflicting claims about what to eat and how to exercise; charlatans and master marketers are selling bogus products; I encountered tools that are frustrating to use and tools that seemed to require a graduate degree to understand; there are products specialized to the point of being useless for most people, and others that work alone but not in conjunction with others.

I felt frustrated. The internet provided lots of information about health and wellness, but it was hard to know how to apply it to my own life. People want to live long, healthy lives. They should have a resource that empowers them to overcome the particular health challenges they face. Someone needed to build it...

How did you turn your idea into a company?

DM: I hired a trainer and a nutritionist in the hopes they could help me navigate everything. They gave me recommendations and plans. Some were helpful; some weren't. The issue that kept coming up was that even the research that these professionals had learned from was lacking - it was limited in scope or sample size, overly generic, or often outdated.

I spent much of the time with my nutritionist talking about these shortcomings and she confirmed that many of her hundreds of clients experience the same pain points. I was still frustrated, but knowing I wasn't alone made me determined to find a better way.

I called an old friend who is an amazing engineer, explained the problem, and said something like, "I just wish there was a way to combine all of these data streams into a single technology and have it figure out what works best for me specifically, and what lifestyle factors I need to change in order to achieve my goals." Much to my surprise, he said there was and, in fact, that's exactly what machine learning did. Ommyx was born.

What have been some of the biggest challenges you've faced so far?

DM: Inaccurate and incomplete data has been the biggest challenge so far. Finding people who have tracked different data for long periods of time is not easy. Since many people have not received much value from their data in the past, they tend to become disenchanted, give up, and move on to the next thing.

How are you using health data?

DM: Health data is the key to our business. It's the core of what we do. We use data to find patterns between people's behavior and lifestyle choices, and their health and performance outputs.

What do you think are the current gaps in health data today?

DM: Health data has come a long way, but we are still at the very early stages. The main gaps today focus on accuracy across two areas:

1. Hardware limitations: Even the leading products are not always collecting data at clinical-level quality and accuracy.
2. User compliance: Large-scale data analysis requires a lot of data and is far more valuable when it is collected accurately and consistently. Users today cannot be depended on to do this.

What do you think is the future of this space?

DM: There will be massive advancements in hardware, software, and at-home testing over the coming years. We will be able to track our health and performance data without interruption or intrusion - our parents' generation could only perform this type of tracking in medical labs, if at all.

But in order to maximize adoption and proper use, we need to increase consumer understanding and education. As industry leaders, it is our collective responsibility to demonstrate that tracking data is an investment in your health rather than a cost of your time, money, and energy. This will help to improve how hardware and software work together to empower users to make improvements in the quality and quantity of their years.

Anything else we should write about?

DM: We are starting a private Pilot Program to test the first version of our app with a small group of users and will be doing more later this year. If you are dedicated to and passionate about wellness and fitness, you can go here to get more information and sign up for early access!