Max Levchin, the co-founder of Paypal, Yelp, board member at Yahoo, and general all-round Silicon valley superstar, doesn’t really come across as someone you’d likely turn to when wanting to discuss the intricacies of fertility and women’s health. But that’s exactly what he was doing on Wednesday at All Things D’s D11 Conference, where he revealed a surprisingly deep knowledge about things like menstrual cycles and cervical mucus.

Why? Because his latest startup Glow is a mobile app that draws on Big Data to help women get pregnant”

“Having babies is a moral imperative for the human race. What’s been missing for people who can’t is data and financial arbitrage,” says Levchin.

According to Levchin, the infertility ‘market’ (if that’s the right word) is worth some $5 billion a year, as the condition is said to affect as many as one in five women. However, one of the problems is that most health insurers categorize infertility treatments as “elective procedures” with costs coming close to $30,000. As a result, it ain’t all that cheap for women to buy this kind of coverage.

So can Glow be the answer? Without wanting to get people’s hopes up too much, it sure looks like it could be worth a shot. The Glow fertility app is designed to help couples improve their chances of conceiving by using Big Data analytics to pinpoint the time when a woman is at her most fertile. The way it works is that women input data about their menstrual cycle, their basal body temperature, their emotions, diet and other health related data, which the app then crunches together in the context of known medical correlations. Having done all this, the app simply predicts the days in which a woman has the best chances of conceiving.

Alongside the app, Levchin is launching Glow First, a companion program that’s designed to help make fertility treatment more affordable for couples. Essentially, what it does is to spread the risk among couples that are trying to conceive – each users donates $50 a month, and at the end of a ten month period those women who haven’t managed to get pregnant will have the costs of their fertility treatment paid for at a pre-approved clinic. In addition, Levchin is also getting doctors on board, and will allow them access to Glow data so that they can make their own recommendations for couples trying to conceive.

“We want to solve the ridiculous state of people not having insurance,” says Levchin, who’s kickstarting the project with $1 million of his own cash.