New Delhi-based child healthcare startup Babygogo has raised $300K (INR 2 Cr.) in seed funding from a clutch of angel investors including Rajul Garg, a veteran in healthcare investment, having invested in Qikwell, HealthKart & Cygnus Medicare earlier.
The other investors included Dr Aniruddha Malpani, IVF specialist from Mumbai and an angel investor; Daljit Singh, President of Fortis Healthcare; Aditya Vij, ex-CEO of Fortis Healthcare; Salil Kapoor, ex-COO, DishTV; Dr Kishore Kumar, Founder & Chairman, Cloud Nine Hospitals; Ashu Agarwal, Director, BW Accelerate; Ashish Tulsian, Founder, Posist; Afsal Salu, Founder Delyver; Dr Shuchin Bajaj, founder of Cygnus Hospitals; Dr Ritesh Malik, founder of Innov8.
Babygogo is a community of parents and doctors where parents seek information and help about child health care. The platform enables new parents to browse information and articles on things like baby food, health and day-to-day parenting.
The startup plans to use the funds raised to build deep tech and analytical engine in order to deliver tailor-made content to parents. The other part will be utilised in exploring new channels of digital marketing.
From Motivation To Idea To Startup
Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Sowrab NRS and Satyadeep Karnati, founded AddoDoc (the parent company of Babygogo), a platform for doctors to manage patient data in 2014. AddoDoc helped doctors feed patient records into the system, keep track of their visits & medicines, and send appointment reminders through SMS.
During his childhood, Siddhartha was treated for malaria, whereas he was suffering from typhoid. The antibiotics resulted in side-effects like asthma and allergy to vegetable proteins, like pulses. For the last 20 years, Siddhartha has grappled with allergy and asthma. He feels, if his parents had access to good child health info and advice from best pediatricians, he wouldn’t have suffered from the aforementioned abnormalities. The misfortune of being mis-treated with antibiotics at a very young age and the side effects which impacted his life, led Siddhartha to launch something which could prevent any kid from going through a similar tragedy. This led to the launch of Babygogo in October, 2015.
“We understand that doctors cannot be replaced with a technology platform and we are not trying to become a virtual doctor. We just want to become a hand holder of parent and trusted partner for non-medical health advice,” added Siddhartha.
In the current version, parents can read helpful articles on baby food, health and day-to-day care. Parents can ask their questions within the app and experienced parents & doctors answer within few minutes. Apart from Q/A and articles, parents can record & track their child growth, save health records in app, tele-consult pediatricians, book appointment with their doctor, and get vaccination reminders.
On competition with other startups in the healthcare domain, Siddhartha said, “We are neither a content platform like Babycenter nor a doctor discovery platform like Practo. We are working in niche of mother and child healthcare, delivering value through personalized content.”
The startup is also building a team of in-house experts on child health to help pregnant women and mothers. The health advice will be delivered to parents according to their child’s needs. For example, a 2-year old underweight kid with asthma would receive help from experts on how to increase weight and build stronger lungs.
The other startups that deal in child healthcare and wellness are My Child App, that raised seed funding of $100K from 500 Startups, Pallav Nadhani and Ritesh Malik; BabyBerry, which secured angel funding of $1 Mn and Tinystep, which managed to raise funding from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Matt Glickman.
Addodoc was among the 14 startups that pitched at our event StartupPulse Delhi first edition.
