PayPal's Co-Founder Made an App That Predicts Pregnancy

How many of you have watched news coverage of the royal baby for the last nine months? Between the little prince of Cambridge and KimYe’s North Star, the world has been catapulted into a baby frenzy, to the point that a lot of women around the world seem to want to start conceiving themselves. And naturally, there’s an app for that.

Making babies is hard work. In France, men have already lost one-third of their sperm. In the United States alone, 6 percent of married women aged 15-44 are unable to get pregnant and even more than that are having trouble conceiving, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Glow, a new fertility app from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, takes aim at the issue. The iPhone-only app hit the App Store today, and tracks ovulation data and monitors menstruation cycles, which is then given to Glow’s scientists and doctors to decide when a woman’s best chance of fertility is. Glow sends frequent messages to users with the percent chance they have of getting pregnant that day. All data is anonymous, but results are customized to fit specific information the app is fed.

It'll cost some users, at least a bit upfront. Glow First, an aspect of the app that actually pays for fertility treatments. Glow First users can contribute $50 into a pool for 10 months. Your money isn’t returned if you conceive within the 10 months—don’t worry, the arrival of your bundle of joy will help you forget about the $500 you just lost. But for the users who faced some speed bumps on the 10-month road to conception, the app will pay for all fertility treatments or procedures using the collective pool of cash. It’s a pretty sweet deal, since fertility treatments aren’t mandated in federal health laws, and as a result most insurance companies don’t cover the costly operations. Only Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island require health plans to offer fertility coverage.

To kickstart the fund, Levchin graciously donated $1 million from his $1 billion net worth. But the app has also received outside support recently, with an extra $6 million raised in venture capital funding. Eventually, the team hopes to use the information to study the science behind conception and learn how to address growing infertility rates.