Parenting-pregnancy app Healofy raises money; rewards platform Cred in funding talks

Parenting-pregnancy social network app Healofy has raised $10 million (Rs 69 crore at current exchange rate) in a Series A round, said 36Kr, a Chinese website that tracks startup fundraisings in the country.

The round was led by Alibaba-backed parenting network and e-commerce portal Babytree, which is listed on the Hong Kong Stock exchange. The following joined the round: Existing investor Omidyar Network and emerging market-focused Chinese venture capital firm BAce Capital.

Healofy, owned by Vivoiz Healthtech Pvt. Ltd, was a part of Facebook’s FbStart programme in 2016 and had raised a seed funding of $41 million in March 2018 from Omidyar.

Healofy was founded by Gaurav Aggarwal and Shubham Maheshwari in 2015 and supports 11 Indian languages. The platform has user-generated content and blogs where users can post queries on pregnancy and/or parenting. The company competes with similar platforms in the space including BabyChakra, Parentlane and Tinystep.

Separately, five-month-old Dreamplug Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which owns Cred, a members-only platform that rewards users for paying credit card bills on time, is in talks to raise a tranche of $100 million (Rs 689 crore) at a valuation of $300 million (Rs 2,067.4 crore). The development was reported by Mint, which cited company sources as saying that there was great in-bound interest but did not identify the potential investors.

Cred is helmed by serial entrepreneur Kunal Shah who sold his payments platform Freecharge to Snapdeal for $400 million in 2015, which was later bought by Axis Bank at a 90% discount.  

Cred offers discounts on shopping, healthcare, travel and other services. For the rewards, Cred has partnered with the likes of furniture rental platform Furlenco, travel booking site Ixigo, and healthcare platform CureFit.

Cred had raised $30 million in June last year from multiple investors including Sequoia Capital, RPT Global, China’s Morningside Ventures, ahead of its launch in November.

In another development, Bengaluru-based medical technology platform Inito said it has been selected for the winter 2019 batch of US startup incubator Y Combinator. The platform, which has developed a flagship product enabling smartphones to do fertility diagnosis, will be joining four other Indian companies in the cohort: Cityfurnish, Skill-Lync, Mudrex Inc. and Trexo Robotics.  

Inito, owned by Samplytics Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which had raised $1.8 million in an angel round from US-based and Singapore-based investors, has launched two hormone tests and plans to launch eight more. 

Inito was set up in January 2015 by former Siemens employees Aayush Rai (IIT-Roorkee alumnus) and Varun AV (IIT-Madras graduate).