Saeju Jeong arrived in Manhattan in 2005 with, by one account, $3,000 and nobody he knew. He had left a Korean engineering degree at Hongik University behind. He took sales jobs. He delivered food.
The reason he left is the hidden thread of the story. Jeong was born in 1981 into a family of doctors. He has said there were 29 medical doctors in his family. His father was one, an obstetrician and gynecologist, who died early of lung cancer, as Jeong said on a 2023 podcast. An Aspen Institute profile says that loss redirected the course of his life. The son of a renowned doctor did not become one.
An Aspen Institute profile says that loss redirected the course of his life.
Before that came a stranger start. In 2001 he founded BuyHard Productions, an independent heavy-metal label. In 2002 he joined the Korean army as an IT specialist. Then he enrolled at Hongik and, in 2005, dropped out.
In Harlem, he met Artem Petakov, a former Google software engineer. In 2007 they founded WorkSmart Labs, whose first prototype was an accessory for a stationary bike. It was not an obvious route to healthcare. In 2011, renamed Noom, it raised a $2.6 million seed led by Kleiner Perkins.
The turn came with the app. A study of about 36,000 users found 78 percent self-reported weight loss, and in 2017 the CDC recognized Noom as a diabetes prevention program, the first mobile health app to receive the designation. A subscription version made it a business, with about $400 million in revenue in 2020 and $540 million raised in 2021 at a $3.7 billion valuation.
The cost arrived with the scale. Critics said its calorie goals were sometimes too low and its coaches lacked dietitian credentials. In 2022 it agreed to a $62 million settlement over automatic renewals, and a former engineer testified that cancelling was made hard on purpose. Jeong stepped down as CEO in 2023 and Geoff Cook took over.
A founder whose father was a doctor ended up building a health company anyway, by another door. The family trade did not pass to him as medicine. It passed as a question: what do people need to stay well, and who will help them do it? Whether that was his own reasoning, the sources do not say, but the path is documented.