Omidyar Network puts in $1 Mn in parenting startup Healofy

Multilingual parenting startup Healofy has secured $1 million in its seed funding round from Omidyar Network.

The Bengaluru-based women-centric startup will use the latest proceeds to strengthen the existing personalisation engine, hiring and to add more regional languages to the app.

Founded in October 2015 by Gaurav Aggarwal and Shubham Maheshwari, a peer-to-peer content platform of moms and moms-to-be Healofy attracts women around health and lifestyle in the form of user-generated content and Q/As on pregnancy and parenting.

Currently, it supports eight regional languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, and Tamil.

With the latest fund infusion, the company aims to grow its active user base 10x in 2018.

Healofy was selected into Facebook's 'FBStart program' and launched a WhatsApp Helpline by developing a smart assistant bot in 2016. They use the bot to provide vaccine-related information and other tips to users.

Through FbStart programme, Healofy was expected to get about $40,000 credits and free tools and services from Facebook and its more than 30 partners including Amazon, UserTesting, Dropbox, and MailChimp.

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Apart from the aforementioned findings, the startup has earlier raised funds from Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal, Citrus Pay founder Jitendra Gupta and other Silicon Valley-based angels in October last year.

The marketsize of parenting startups in India hovers around $30-billion. In online community of moms, expectant parents, and doctors which works around the theme of pregnancy and parenting counts startups like Tinystep, Parenttune, Parentlane, Babychakra, Babygogo, and others. All of them have been growing rapidly in the partially-served segment.

The development was reported by Business Standard.