Parentune, the "way of life" for Indian parents, raises second round of funding

Nitin Pandey, Founder of Parentune, says, “We see Babytech as a big impact opportunity. India alone has 500 million parents, and close to 29 million newborns each year. Considering that the majority of our population is young, imagine the scale of impact Parentune can make in the life of each parent and child. Our vision is to be the must-have support for parents, and we are excited to be moving in that direction. We have raised this round of funding to continue building a highly personalised support for parents, with technology, data and intelligence at the centre of Parentune’s scale up.”

Parentune, one of India's more prominent parenting apps, closed its second round of funding from Kae Capital and SEGNEL Ventures. While the amount remains undisclosed, the company confirms that it is a Series B round, and that they will be using these funds in making a firmer technology roadmap and scaling up, which entails the launch of the network in Hindi and other languages.

Conceived in 2012 by Nitin to support parents, Parentune is an online community of verified and registered parents for real-time advice and support through its website, mobile site, and app. Parentune’s revenue model is based on associating with brands who are granted access to the parent profiles based on criteria like child’s age, location, and concerns and interests of parents through a responsible template, which ensures a superior ROI for brands while safeguarding the parents’ privacy.

They are scaling rapidly, with more than three million sessions monthly across their website, mobile site and mobile app. Parentune recently even crossed the one million verified parents milestone. Although the majority of the users are from India, the network also has parents from the UAE, the UK, Singapore and the US as well, especially on mobile. Parentune has also grown rapidly on the business front, with a sixfold revenue growth in just a year. It has two streams of revenue - the brand revenues and the pro-parent services (value added services for parents).

“We have tested a vernacular version and are launching a Parentune Hindi version now. We would want parents to be able to find the Parentune support in their preferred language, independent of their location,” says Nitin.

Their lean 12-member team is striving to be an exhaustive resource in areas like nutrition, health, education, and child psychology and behaviour, and they claim to engage their users for 9-10 minutes per session, on an average. With close to 500,000 downloads, it’s also among the top three mobile apps on Google Playstore in the parenting category.

Venugopal Pottu, Parentune’s Co-founder and CTO, also explains their current R&D scenario, and what they are building and perfecting. “Each parent actually sees a personalised version of Parentune, which is achieved through HOTSPOT, Parentune’s trends analytics and listening IP. Going forward, we are working on making this support more intuitive, which means real-time intelligence with an improved response mechanism for parents. This shall perhaps be unique and a 'first' in multiple ways,” he says. 

Vidushi Kamani, Venture Partner at Kae, states, “There are low entry barriers in this segment. Parentune stands out as having grown organically by enabling real-time and meaningful advise and support through its platform.”

Segnel Ventures is an early-stage fund from Singapore that funds startups across the South East Asia region. Segnel’s Founder Hideki Fujita says, "A lot of users love Parentune; there are three million monthly sessions across the website and app. The fact that Parentune has improved continuously by listening to their users through the use of technology is their strength and uniqueness both."