Healofy, a women-centric, multilingual parenting social network today announced that it has raised USD 1 million from Omidyar Network as part of their seed round, announced the company in a press release.
The company had previously raised funds from Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com and Jitendra Gupta, founder of Citrus Pay and other Sillicon Valley based marquee investors in October last year. They were also selected in Y Combinator in 2017. The latest funding will help Healofy add key talent in leadership positions across product, technology and data science; to build onto the existing personalization engine and layer in multiple regional languages on their platform.
Selected by Facebook's FBStart in 2016 end, Healofy is a mobile focussed parenting app. Founded by Gaurav Aggarwal and Shubham Maheshwari, the app allows parents and expectant parents to discover, connect, ask and chat with other like-minded users in various regional languages.
“Owing to lack of credible and relatable information on pregnancy and baby care, every year India loses more than 50,000 pregnant women and 1.8 billion babies. My co-founder Shubham and I started solving this problem an year and a half back by building 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, a platform that allows moms and moms-to-be to discover, connect, ask and chat with like-minded users to make an informed health and lifestyle decisions ,” - says Gaurav Aggarwal, CEO, Healofy.
Hailed as the ‘social network of choice’ for parents and parents-to-be, the app is available in Android Play Store and supports 8 local languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Tamil. Currently, it has over 300,000 downloads on the Play Store with an average user rating of 4.8 . On an average, their active user base spends over 10 million minutes a month on the app.
Siddharth Nautiyal, Investment Partner, Omidyar Network said : "As the next half a billion users come online in India over the next 5 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. Gaurav, Shubham, and the founding team have done great work in developing a platform that provides advice and support for pregnant women and parents. Healofy’s engagement numbers are a testament to the high value perceived by their target audience, and we are excited about this opportunity to help the company achieve its full potential.”
"Over the last 6 months, we have become the fastest growing and highest ranked parenting app in India. As a result, several VCs have shown interest but we were lucky to have Omidyar Network, a founder-friendly VC firm with deep focus and expertise in the vernacular space, on our board. And now, with Omidyar Network’s support, we plan to grow our active user base 10x in 2018,” added Gaurav.
Few days back, Omidyar has participated in ₹3.5 crore funding of Doubtnut, a Gurugram-based edtech startup. Prior to that, it participated in $1.6 million funding of Transerve Technologies, a Goa-based civic tech company.
Shubham Maheshwari, CTO, Healofy adds, “Healofy is performing at par with Facebook on key social networking metrics like DAU/MAU ratio and that makes us believe we are in for something crazy and big especially as the Network Effects kick in for us within the next few months.”
On why invest in parenting tech company, Anupam Mittal, Founder and CEO, People Group stated, "In a market starved of original ideas the Healofy team has managed to build a super engaging platform for women and mothers. Their focus on their customers coupled with their next billion strategy should help them build a very valuable business. I am lucky to have led their angel round.” Another marquee investor Jitender Gupta, Founder, Citrus Pay commented, “Gaurav and his team have got the right mindset to understand the relevant target segment. With its truly differentiated content first parenting social network, Healofy will cater to the need of millions of vernacular Indian users."
The parenting market in India is pegged at $30-billion and several app based startups are coming up to provide 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.
The company had previously raised funds from Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com and Jitendra Gupta, founder of Citrus Pay and other Sillicon Valley based marquee investors in October last year. They were also selected in Y Combinator in 2017. The latest funding will help Healofy add key talent in leadership positions across product, technology and data science; to build onto the existing personalization engine and layer in multiple regional languages on their platform.
Selected by Facebook's FBStart in 2016 end, Healofy is a mobile focussed parenting app. Founded by Gaurav Aggarwal and Shubham Maheshwari, the app allows parents and expectant parents to discover, connect, ask and chat with other like-minded users in various regional languages.
“Owing to lack of credible and relatable information on pregnancy and baby care, every year India loses more than 50,000 pregnant women and 1.8 billion babies. My co-founder Shubham and I started solving this problem an year and a half back by building 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, a platform that allows moms and moms-to-be to discover, connect, ask and chat with like-minded users to make an informed health and lifestyle decisions ,” - says Gaurav Aggarwal, CEO, Healofy.
Hailed as the ‘social network of choice’ for parents and parents-to-be, the app is available in Android Play Store and supports 8 local languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Tamil. Currently, it has over 300,000 downloads on the Play Store with an average user rating of 4.8 . On an average, their active user base spends over 10 million minutes a month on the app.
Siddharth Nautiyal, Investment Partner, Omidyar Network said : "As the next half a billion users come online in India over the next 5 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. Gaurav, Shubham, and the founding team have done great work in developing a platform that provides advice and support for pregnant women and parents. Healofy’s engagement numbers are a testament to the high value perceived by their target audience, and we are excited about this opportunity to help the company achieve its full potential.”
"Over the last 6 months, we have become the fastest growing and highest ranked parenting app in India. As a result, several VCs have shown interest but we were lucky to have Omidyar Network, a founder-friendly VC firm with deep focus and expertise in the vernacular space, on our board. And now, with Omidyar Network’s support, we plan to grow our active user base 10x in 2018,” added Gaurav.
Few days back, Omidyar has participated in ₹3.5 crore funding of Doubtnut, a Gurugram-based edtech startup. Prior to that, it participated in $1.6 million funding of Transerve Technologies, a Goa-based civic tech company.
Shubham Maheshwari, CTO, Healofy adds, “Healofy is performing at par with Facebook on key social networking metrics like DAU/MAU ratio and that makes us believe we are in for something crazy and big especially as the Network Effects kick in for us within the next few months.”
On why invest in parenting tech company, Anupam Mittal, Founder and CEO, People Group stated, "In a market starved of original ideas the Healofy team has managed to build a super engaging platform for women and mothers. Their focus on their customers coupled with their next billion strategy should help them build a very valuable business. I am lucky to have led their angel round.” Another marquee investor Jitender Gupta, Founder, Citrus Pay commented, “Gaurav and his team have got the right mindset to understand the relevant target segment. With its truly differentiated content first parenting social network, Healofy will cater to the need of millions of vernacular Indian users."
The parenting market in India is pegged at $30-billion and several app based startups are coming up to provide 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.
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