Child care services marketplace BabyChakra secures seed funding from Mumbai Angels, others

Infomoko Technology Pvt. Ltd, which owns and operates parenting tips child care services listing and consulting portal BabyChakra, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by Mumbai Angels, Patni Family Office and Singapore Angel Network.

BabyChakra will use the money to accelerate traction, hire professionals and launch a mobile app among other things, as per a press statement.

"We backed the team at BabyChakra for two reasons. Firstly, BabyChakra is a truly innovative product that solves a real need for young parents today: making better, more informed care decisions for their families. Secondly, the team has executed fast, shown strong traction and loyalty in users and is set to scale rapidly," said Karan Maheshwari, deal lead for Mumbai Angels.

Satveer Singh Thakral from the Singapore Angel Network, Karan Maheshwari, Jatin Aneja, Kishor Ganji and Roopa Nath are among the other co-investors to have participated in this round of funding.

Founded in 2014, BabyChakra is an online community that connect parents where they can share baby activities. It provides reviews and listings of events, playschools, day-cares, prenatal classes, wellness, support service centres, shopping and health care centres through its proprietary MomStar programme.

BabyChakra's founding team comprises of Naiyya Saggi (Harvard Business School alumnus and a former McKinsey consultant), Mitesh Karia (FMS Delhi, formerly with HSBC) and Mohit Kumar (IIT-Delhi, DzignUp co-founder).

BabyChakra has listings of services in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. The company says it has connected over 2.5 lakh parents to over 5,500 local service providers to date.

It is the second back-to-back online venture related to child care related services to have bagged funding.

Last month, another under one-year-old parenting and child safety-focused portal ZenParent.in had secured $500,000 (Rs 3.17 crore) in funding from Bangalore-based i2india Venture Factory.

ZenParent, which started as an initiative to build child safety tools, has developed into a discovery platform that helps urban parents with various challenges related to child rearing. It has also built a personalised app for users.

Through its web-based and mobile offerings, ZenParent provides answers for parenting queries and offers insights on personality, interests and life skills of children. The mobile app offers curated information related to child development articles, parenting and childcare tips, latest kid-related events, special recipes, book recommendations and movie/TV show reviews.

According to research and consultancy firm RNCOS, the domestic baby and children care products market is growing in sync with the retail industry growth, and is estimated to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of around 17 per cent to reach $26.2 billion by 2017.