BabyChakra raises Series-A funding from Seattle-based RoundGlass

Baby industry boom continues in India. Yesterday, FirstCry announced $34 million funding and consolidation with Mahindra Retail(BabyOye). And today, BabyChakra, a social discovery platform for young parents in India, has raised its Series-A funding from Seattle-based RoundGlass.

The company had earlier raised $600,000 funding led by Mumbai Angles, Patni Family Office and Singapore Angel Network in June 2015. Satveer Singh Thakral from the Singapore Angel Network, Karan Maheshwari, Jatin Aneja, Kishor Ganji and Roopa Nath also participated in the previous round.

While the earlier funds were used to accelerate traction, hire top talent and launch of Android app, the current round will help BabyChakra invest in:

• product development,
• strategic hires and,
• to create localized content.

Founded by Naiyya Saggi, Mitesh Karia and Mohit Kumar, BabyChakra is a parenting platform in India for pregnancy and childcare for resources and information on parenting and early childhood development.

BabyChakra provides information on conception, pregnancy, birth, and early childhood for parents and parents-to-be. This includes reviews of more than 25,000 maternity and childcare services. BabyChakra claims that its community is comprised of 500,000 mothers who visit regularly seeking advice and support.

According to Naiyya, BabyChakra solves two main problems:

1. Because young couples are essentially raising children in nuclear families with no support system to fall back on, parenting can be very isolating and many first-time parents need guidance and reassurance or immediate access to urgent questions.
2. This same community of young couples are also highly-active online consumers who use the internet to find homes, to seek guidance on technology purchases, and look for recommendations for restaurants and travel destinations.

Sunny Singh, Founder of RoundGlass believes that digital health solutions can have a profound impact on India which justifies the firm's investment in BabyChakra.

Started in August 2014, Bengaluru-based ZenParent competes with BabyChakra. Zenparent is funded by Venture Factory (by i2india). At 1.3% of GDP, India's health sector also continues to be among the countries with the lowest relative public expenditure on healthcare. Private healthcare sector is growing steadily over the last two decade owing to the demand for better healthcare facilities and awareness.

According to the report on Maternity and Child Care (MCC) Hospitals Market in India 2015 – 2020, Maternity and Child Care (MCC) Hospitals market in India is expected to be worth US$ 27.63 billion by 2020.