A new mom, an expectant one or a woman who’s trying to conceive can get instant constant care, empathy and support, thanks to an AI-enabled, peer-to-peer platform. When a woman is set to bring a new life into the world, it is important for her to stay informed and healthy through the nine months of excitement and anxiety.
The joint family system which acted as a support system to would-be parents has disappeared. “Today, about 75 percent of families are nuclear and about 45 percent of couples are struggling to conceive, making the need for a support system more pronounced. That is where PregBuddy has stepped in”, Sivareena Sarika tells Subhalakshmi Roy.
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Moved by the episode of a cousin’s miscarriage and the trauma that followed, Sivareena decided to connect pregnant women over WhatsApp to help them stay informed, feel reassured, and track emotional and bodily changes. She, with co-founder Subhadeep Mondal, started out by meeting expecting mothers waiting at hospitals and linked them through a WhatsApp group. Soon, the conversations crossed a lakh a month.
That is when the co-founders decided to quit their respective jobs and build an application, which is a peer-to-peer instant reassurance platform for pregnant women based on region, language, trimester of pregnancy and past medical conditions.
An AI-enabled care continuum platform, the PregBuddy application connects pregnant women, their doctors and caregivers to track every bit of the information on a weekly basis. Be it tackling food aversions, nausea, morning sickness or the change in the texture of hair and skin, free pregnancy tips and advice at every stage keeps expecting mothers aware and alert. The application recommends the right type of exercises and yoga, diet and nutrition for staying fit. It also offers consultations on topics right from body changes, baby movements, baby shower ideas, baby names and so on, ensuring a smooth journey towards parenthood.
From answering queries from pregnant women struck by midnight cravings to offering a pregnancy calculator, PregBuddy’s a comprehensive health monitoring and personalized care platform to millions of women via health experts and doctors right from the pre-conceiving stage up till the early years of motherhood.
As the founders delved deeper into this space, a gap in constant care between the expecting patient and her gynecologist struck them. This led to the development of a new product ‘Connected Care’. It is again, an AI-powered patient-centric platform that maps every stakeholder at the hospital and ensures quality care for expecting mothers. It engages the patient via sharing of medical records and remote monitoring, enhances the process of care delivery through expert opinions and fast-track collaboration and develops predictive analytics such as patient happiness index and care provider performance index.
A shining example is of an expecting mother who used PregBuddy for emotional support throughout a 12-hour labor until she delivered the baby. It is the moments such as this that make it fulfilling for this team of five people. The founders aim to touch 10 million mothers by the year 2020.
“Our biggest inspiration has been our users. We receive over 10 emails every day thanking us for being their buddy and sharing their newborn’s images. This provides us immense satisfaction and boost to our team to do more.”
– Shubhadeep Mondal & Sivareena Sarika, Founders of PregBuddy
By connecting all stakeholders around the birth of a child, this startup has been addressing a huge gap in the personalized healthcare market while providing empathy to would-be mothers. It has already picked up several awards:
PregBuddy has been recognised as the Top #Tech30 startups at TechSparks 2018. It was selected among 14 startups globally in the BlackBox Connect 22 cohort, California. Seed-funded in early 2018, by Rajan Anandan (VP SEA & MD Google India), Indian Angel Network and HNIs, PregBuddy was also among 10 startups in the 1st cohort of Google’s Solve for India programme, 2018. Renowned actor Akshay Kumar and Franchise India awarded PregBuddy as the Startup SuperHero 2018 at IIT, Delhi. It is also among the winners of ET Power of Ideas 2018. PregBuddy was a part of the Indian delegation at Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2017 and was also among top three winners in Venture Engine 2017 at Asian Business Angel Forum, Sri Lanka.
