Sheroes, the women-centric career platform, announced that it has acquired the Delhi based child healthcare startup, Babygogo. The nature and value of the deal are yet to be disclosed; however as per the statement released by the company, the founders of Babygogo will be joining Sheroes as co-founders.

“Babygogo has some of the best engagement numbers and a high empathy community. It has also demonstrated some of the best retention and community practices amongst its peers, and has always been high on user-centric product building,” said Sairee Chahal, Founder and CEO of Sheroes. “Sheroes, as a complete ecosystem for women stands to gain from the platform and its team. At the same time, team Babygogo will take a shot at building for a large ecosystem and creating long term value for everyone. The founders will join as co-founders at Sheroes,” she added.

“Over a period of time we have found that the queries of mothers go beyond the realm of baby care, and they also post queries and have conversations around careers, mental health and personal care. This is an indicator that our community does seek support around aspects that go beyond their identity as mothers. Through this acquisition, Babygogo community members can benefit from the strong ecosystem legacy of Sheroes, as well as through their relationships and existing women’s communities,” said Babygogo founder, Siddharth Ahluwalia, when speaking about the deal.

“I have closely followed the two platforms and have found common ground to create a large scalable business. Both the teams have highly complementary skills and an ability to execute. I am particularly excited by this opportunity,” said Rajul Garg, who is a common investor of Babygogo and Sheroes.

This is the second acquisition made by Sheroes in the past one year. Earlier in August, the company had acquired the Bangalore- based online career restart platform Women Restart for an undisclosed amount.

Sheroes was founded in 2014 by Sairee Chahal. The startup is a career destination for women in India and aims to reconnect over 300 million women to job opportunities. The company is currently serving a client base spread over 20,000 locations and around 12000 companies are using the portal. Sheroes is already present in the major metropolitan cities of India and is looking to expand to tier 2 cities like Jaipur and Indore as well. Sheroes also has an enterprise platform operated by Applied life Pvt. Ltd which operates products like SHE- which is a platform to prevent sexual harassment in the work place in addition to being a managed remote solutions platform. The start-up had raised seed funding to the tune of RS. 5 crore in 2015.

Thereafter in August 2016, it received Series A investment from $1.8 million (Rs. 11.5 crore) from the U.S based PE firm Lumis Partners , along with participation from The HR Fund and the angel investor Rajul Garg.  Hardly a month after the investments, the startup went on to acquire the health counselling platform LoveDoctor for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition allowed Sheroes to expand its network of doctors so as to provide effective solutions to the queries posted by women on its platform.  In October, the company went on to acquire yet another start-up, namely Gharkamai, an online platform focused on providing women work from home opportunities. Once again, in this deal as well, the acquisition amount remained undisclosed.

Babygogo, on the other hand, was founded in 2014 by Siddharth Ahluwalia, Sowrabh N R S and Satyadeep Karnati .The firm commenced as a technology enabled platform to provide parents, especially mothers, advice on baby care. The platform provides mothers with articles on baby food, health and day to day care. The mothers can post queries which are addressed by doctors or other experienced mothers. In addition to this, parents can also track their child’s growth, get vaccination reminders and save health records on the platform. In March 2016, Babygogo successfully raised Rs. 2 crore in a seed funding round, which saw participation from angel investor Rajul Garg and a number of health executives.

Sheroes has been using an aggressive acquisition strategy in order to provide an exhaustive set of services to women using its platform.  The company aims to use its acquisition of Babygogo to further enhance its presence among women in the country.

In a broader sense, a number of start-ups in the parenting and baby care segment have successfully been raising funds. To quote a few examples, in July, the parenting start-up mycity4kids raised Rs. 4 crore from an early stage venture capital firm, YourNest Capital Advisers and a number of high net worth individuals. In September, the pregnancy and baby care products company Mom Co.  Raised $ 1 million (approx. Rs. 6.5 crore) in a series A round of funding which was co- led by DSG Consumer Partners and Saama Capital. And just a week or two ago , the start up Baby Destination raised $ 312,000 ( Rs. 2 crore) from GEMs Partners ( a micro capital fund) and Tariq Khan , an angel investor from New York. Clearly, the parenting and baby products segment in the country seems to be growing well.

(Picture courtesy: indianceo.in)