Startup Stories – Noom CEO, Saeju Jeong

Updated: November 19th, 2023

At Starter Story, we find and catalogue business case studies from all over the internet, for you! This case study was not conducted by Starter Story, but it has been verified by our team. You can check out the full story here.


Noom is a mobile health app subscription service that encourages people to make behavioral changes to live healthier lives. The company was founded by Saeju Jeong & Artem Petakov in 2008.

Co-founder Saeju Jeong's father, WooGil, was a well-known obstetrician-gynecologist who founded a hospital in Yeosu, South Korea. However, he passed away from lung cancer at the age of 51. Before his father's death, Saeju ran a thriving heavy metal music label called BuyHard Productions. But, after his father's demise, he decided to start fresh and embark on a new path.

Artem Petakov and Saeju Jeong met at a dinner in New York City in 2005 and quickly bonded over their shared immigrant status and interest in technology. Petakov had taken a class at Princeton with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and was thinking about habit changes, such as going to the gym and getting healthier.

Jeong was immediately drawn to the idea and convinced Petakov to start a company. Petakov hesitated as he had just started a new job at Google but eventually left to work on the new venture with Jeong.

The founders had figured that Android would quickly eclipse Apple's iOS in user numbers, and that would give them instant scale. They were right, sort of. Over eight months, the app climbed to the top spot in the Android rankings of most-downloaded fitness apps.

While Noom does advertise a free one-week trial, a subscription costs up to $59 a month. Each plan is individualized, and the recommended duration of the program is based on the amount of weight you want to lose.

The company, which makes an app that employs psychological principles to nudge its users into making healthier lifestyle choices, increased its annual revenue from $237 million to $400 million in 2020.

It raised $540 million in a Series F investment round in May 2021 from such heavy hitters as Silver Lake and Sequoia Capital, and it's been rumored to be eyeing an IPO in the coming year at a $10 billion valuation.

Key Success Indicators:

  • The company's platform is used by leading healthcare and pharmaceutical companies to improve patient treatment outcomes.
  • Noom has a virtual diabetes prevention program that the CDC has recognized.
  • The company's first foray beyond weight loss, Noom Mood, launched in October and aims to tackle another hot topic in the time of Covid: stress and anxiety.
  • Noom launched in early 2007 under the name WorkSmart Labs.
  • It has helped over 50 million people and is headquartered in New York City with employees working worldwide.

article