Parenting start-up Healofy raises $1 million from Omidyar Network

Healofy, a parenting start-up, has raised $1 million from Omidyar Network as part of their seed round.

The multilingual platform will use the fresh funding to add key talent in leadership positions across segments; build onto the existing personalisation engine and add more regional languages to the app. It currently supports eight local languages, including Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Tamil.

“With Omidyar Network’s support, we plan to grow our active user base 10x in 2018,” said Gaurav Aggarwal, chief executive officer, Healofy.

According to reports, India loses more than 50,000 pregnant women and 1.8 billion babies due to lack of information on pregnancy and baby care.  

“We built a WhatsApp bot, Swasth Bacha Abhiyaan, through which we sent personalised ‘daily tips’ on pregnancy and parenting to more than half a million Indian moms in their local language. Witnessing the demand first-hand, we evolved into Healofy,” added Aggarwal.

The company had previously raised funds from Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com, and Jitendra Gupta, founder of Citrus Pay and other Silicon Valley based marquee investors in October last year.

“As the next half a billion users come online in India over the next five years, they will need local language and India-first content. In addition, women as a demographic are severely under-represented amongst Indian internet users. Healofy, with its tailored and habit-forming parenting social network, is tackling this problem head-on,” said Siddharth Nautiyal of Omidyar Network. The firm has so made 207 investments so far with 64 lead investments.

The $30-billion parenting market in India has seen the birth of several app based start-ups, providing a platform to new parents seeking guidance on pre and post pregnancy phases. Some of these are Tinystep, Parenttune, Parentlane, Babychakra, Zen Parent and Babygogo. Flipkart-backed Tinystep raised $2 million in funding last year.