iJoule tackles yo-yo diet effect and secures funding… again

Anybody who has ever tried losing weight knows that it’s a pain in the ass. But what’s even worse is gaining the same amount of weight in half of the time you’ve achieved your weight loss. This phenomenon, mostly referred to as the “yo-yo effect” is a problem on multiple levels ranging from personal frustration to a global increase in mortality.

These circumstances have led to a plethora of web applications that help people losing weight through online diet coaching to weight tracking and even to real-life products such as the rather successful Wi-fi enabled Withings scale. Sharing your weight with your peers induces pressure and pressure is somewhat necessary for losing weight. Yet most of the available dieting communities out there seem to forget about the yo-yo effect.

Successful and sustainable weight loss is mostly due to multiple factors of lifestyle modification. iJoule, a startup that’s been around since 2007 (!) and used to be backed by Morten Lund, tries to tackle this problem by providing its users with a comprehensive set of features that entails all aspects of dieting, from sports to psychological tests and virtual dietitians that help you achieve your goals.

What’s happened since 2007? Founded by David Beckmann and initially supported and invested in by various individuals from Austria, Germany and Denmark it has since then more or less seized its operations. There was reportedly a takeover of assets, management changes and lots of unknown events. Now, three years later, things looks very different.

After setting up an entirely new structure both on the management and advisory side, the company has raised an undisclosed round of series A funding from First Love Capital. Interestingly, First Love Capital was also one of the backers in 2007.

Although iJoule offers a free-trial period, the service charges a monthly fee if you want to continue using it. Christoph Sauermann, a former pharmaceutical executive and now the company’s CEO told me that they’ve managed to partner with Germany’s public Health insurance, which enables customers to have the costs for using iJoule reimbursed. This approach seems to be scalable and might help lower the barrier of entry for people willing to modify their lifestyle with the help of the Web.