Hacking your Metabolism for Better Health & Wellbeing: Meet Lumen, the Latest Company that Brings us Joy

At Joy Ventures, we’re committed to advancing the groundbreaking science and tech of everyday joy and wellbeing – and if it has anything to do with eating, it makes it that much more joyful. That’s why we’re excited to announce our recent investment in Lumen, the world’s first handheld, portable wellness device and app that measures your metabolism in real-time, anywhere. Nourishing our bodies amounts to our overall emotional health, and “eating your feelings” can take a whole new, positive meaning with Lumen.

Trending: Personalized Care & Functional Medicine

Functional medicine has grown increasingly popular in recent years with the overarching wellness trend. The notion of watching what you eat is nothing new (think WeightWatchers and Jenny Craig), but there has been a paradigm shift in the way nutrition is approached. Consumers are becoming more aware that there’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to health and people are looking for nutrition, weight, and fitness tools that align with their own bodies and personal goals. What’s more, consumers are not only looking for personalized care, but a way to be able to track what’s working and what isn’t (and be able to see their progress.) In a world where we’re constantly surrounded by metrics (screen time, steps counted on your Fitbit or Apple Watch, and even social media likes), keeping track of your nutrition with real-time data is no exception. It’s no longer just about losing a few pounds when stepping on the scale, consumers want to know how their actions are improving their own health.

While there are many solutions on the market, very few can provide a customized intervention based on accurate monitoring that is done in real-time and in an accessible, user-friendly, and affordable way. Creating a product that matches commercial viability with consumer trends – and years of science and R&D – is a challenge. That’s where Lumen comes in to save the day.

Goodbye Fad Diets: Hello Lumen

With Lumen all you need is one breath to learn all about your metabolic health. Reminiscent of a breathalyzer in shape, Lumen is non-invasive and can be easily used anywhere. Previously, the metabolic testing methods were only available to athletes and in specialized clinics, but with Lumen – you’re able to learn whether your body is utilizing fats or carbs for fuel anytime, in a DIY-like way. It also provides customized nutrition recommendations and health and lifestyle tips – transforming into your personal nutritionist, fitness expert and wellness sidekick. By “biohacking” with Lumen, you can optimize your fat burning for energy production and reduce carb storage as fat to maximize your overall health. The key here is consistency with using the device and making it part of your daily routine so that you maximize the benefits – whether it’s finding the right nutrition, optimizing workouts, and/or losing weight.

If it wasn’t enough to praise Lumen for helping us ditch indiscriminate calorie counting and for demystifying our nutritional health and wellbeing; here are a few more reasons:

Disruptive Tech. Right on time.

Tackling metabolism as a metric for overall health and wellness, from a tech standpoint, is revolutionary in its own right. Add to that the seven years of research that went into making Lumen a viable product that works with just a single breath, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for success (and a recipe for a diet that’s *actually* good for you). Furthermore, the development of unique algorithms based on big data (10M metabolic Lumen measurements to be exact) that is accumulated with each additional breath, shows us that the learning opportunities (AI and machine learning) for maximizing health will only continue to grow.

More than just aggregating big data, Lumen is exceptionally unique in that it’s also able to match the correlation between your daily nutrition and biometrics (activity, sleep, heart rate, monthly cycle) to your metabolism, which means you can learn more about how to achieve a well-rounded, holistic lifestyle. But don’t just take our word for it, studies show the potential of Lumen to measure metabolic fuel usage accurately (in response to diet and exercise), making it comparable to  the “gold standard”  of a traditional metabolic cart (those large and expensive metabolic testing machines).

The Market Wants What It Wants

Closing in on its first year (launched in June 2020), Lumen has already received pro athlete endorsement, an Adidas Runners partnership, and features in Forbes, Tech Crunch, Wired, Entrepreneur, and more. Notably, this past month the company also launched the second phase of integrating health and activity data from Garmin alongside metabolic data from the Lumen device and app. Throughout the last 3 months of this integration, Garmin users took over 11,000 post-workout metabolism measurements. The results of these measurements were highly successful, as 70% of users shifted to burning fat as a fuel source following their workout.  Lumen received major traction even before going on the market with an IndieGogo campaign that raised $2.3M from over 9K backers. As of writing this article, the company has already reached sales of tens of thousands of devices and several major partnerships to be announced soon, placing Lumen well on its way to becoming a leading data point for all wearable integrations in real-time to help people better understand how their workouts are impacting their body, optimize their fitness routines and achieve their goals faster.

Female + Science Led Team

Nothing brings us more Joy than to support women in tech and science. Lumen began when twin sisters Merav and Michal Mor- both of whom have PHDs in physiology and are Ironman athletes – decided to take the matter of personalized nutrition into their own hands. Being athletes and scientists, finding a new, cost-efficient and time-saving solution for measuring metabolism became the obvious challenge. In addition to Michal and Merav, who lead the product and science respectively, the other co-founders, Daniel Tal Mor, Dror Ceder and Avi Smila, who are the CEO, CGO and CTO, have been successfully working together for many years in several companies and have proven their ability to work as a team and to grow companies successfully.

With Lumen, you can have your cake and eat it too – and if that doesn’t bring you Joy, we don’t know what will. We’re thrilled to link arms with the Joy team and to be a stepping stone on people’s journeys to optimal, personalized health and wellbeing.