Person attributes
Jonathan Wolf is a British entrepreneur known for being the cofounder and CEO of personalized nutrition company Zoe. Before starting Zoe, Wolf was chief product officer at online marketing and machine learning (ML) company Criteo. Wolf's background is in data science, collecting data, and using ML to create individually personalized recommendations.
Wolf was born in January 1975. He studied physics at the University of Oxford between 1993 and 1997, graduating with a master's degree. While at Oxford, he received the Gibbs Prize for physics and was president of the Oxford Union. He spent a year studying at Harvard University from 1997 until 1998.
He worked for a number of companies, including Yahoo, before joining Criteo in 2009 as chief buying officer. Wolf became chief product officer of Criteo in 2012. When Wolf joined Criteo, it was a thirty-person start-up. He spent seven years at the company. During that time, the company grew to over 2,000 employees with over $1 billion in revenue and went public and traded on Nasdaq. Wolf built the product organization, created the publisher and midmarket sales organization, and opened the New York office. While at Criteo, Wolf gained experience working with ML and artificial intelligence (AI). He left Criteo in April 2016.
In August 2017, Wolf cofounded and became CEO of the personalized nutrition company Zoe. Wolf's cofounders were Tim Spector (Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London) and George Hadjigeorgiou (Previously CEO of HouseTrip and co-founder of efood.gr). Hadjigeorgiou and Wolf previously worked together at Yahoo. After hearing a public talk by Spector about his twins study, they decided to put together a personalized nutrition business pitch.
Zoe provides customers with a home testing kit to identify the right foods for their body. The company runs the world’s largest nutrition science study with Harvard, Stanford, and King's College London to discover how a person's gut microbiome corresponds with their reaction to certain foods. Zoe uses AI to compare test results from people in their study to build a personalized program with an app and coaches to help customers achieve their health goals.
In March 2020, the company paused its project due to COVID-19, launching a symptom-tracking app that went on to have more than 4 million users. Wolf cofounded the ZOE Covid Study (now the ZOE Health Study) with over 4.6 million participants. The study has generated over thirty scientific papers in leading journals like The Lancet and Nature Medicine, including the first ML model to predict COVID-19 from symptoms and a paper linking higher-quality diets to reduced risks of hospitalization from COVID.
Wolf hosts the Zoe Science & Nutrition podcast. He has been a foundation fellow at Corpus Christi College Oxford since 2015. Wolf is married and has two children.
