Parentune Raises Second Round of Funding from Kae Capital & SEGNEL Venture

Parentune, India’s largest parents network with verified parents & real time trusted advice, has announced its second round of funding from Kae Capital & SEGNEL venture. With the Babytech space heating up, parentune has raised the funds towards its technology roadmap, and scale up which includes the launch of the network in Hindi and other languages. The startup was conceived and founded in 2012 to support parents with trusted advice, and validated solutions.

Nitin Pandey, Founder, parentune.com says,“We see Babytech as a big impact opportunity. India alone has 500 million parents and close to 29 million newborns each year. Considering that the majority of our population is young, imagine the scale of impact parentune can make in the life of each parent and child. Our vision has been to be the must have support for parents and we are excited to be moving in that direction. We have raised this round of funding to continue building a highly personalised support for parents, with technology, data and intelligence at the center of parentune’s scale up.”

Parentune is now scaling up faster,with more than 3 million sessions monthly across its website, mobile site and mobile app. It recently crossed the 1 million verified parents milestone. Although, the majority of the users are from India, the network also has parents from UAE, UK, Singapore and US as well, especially on the mobile. Parentune has also grown rapidly on the business front with a 6X revenue growth in just a year. It has two streams of revenue, the Brand revenues and the proparent services, i.e. value added services for parents.

On the development , Nitin adds, “We’re excited about our progress especially the uptake and high usage of parentune on the mobile. We have tested a vernacular version and are launching a parentune Hindi version now. We would want parents to be able to find the parentune support in their preferred language independent of their location. We look forward to our association with Kae Capital and SEGNEL Venture who come with a sharp understanding of the consumer internet and technology space.”

This unique start up is diversified with top talent in technology, content, & growth hacking, business and various expert-areas like nutrition, health, education, child psychology & behaviour. The Parentune app is leading the growth and has an unparalleled engagement of 9-10 min per session. With close to 5,00,000 downloads, it’s also among the top 3 ranked mobile apps on Google play store in the parenting category.

Venugopal, parentune’s Co-founder and CTO shares, “A parent looks for information & solutions, around his/her concerns and interests for his/her child. Each parent has a personalised version of parentune to herself and that makes our support useful and valuable. We achieve this through HOTSPOT, parentune’s trends analytics & listening IP and going forward, we are working on making this support more intuitive without giving away the validated nature of solutions on parentune. It means real time intelligence with an improved response mechanism for parents. Parentune technology team shall innovate and iterate the parentune support for best results. This shall perhaps be unique and a first suchin multiple ways.”

Kae Capital, an early stage fund has reinvested in parentune.Vidushi Kamani, Venture Partner at Kae shares, “There are low entry barriers in this segment. Parentune stands out as a parenting network that brings true value to its members. It has grown organically by listening to its users and enabling real-time and meaningful advise and support through its platform. This is what gives Parentune its differentiated value proposition.”

This round is also participated by Segnel Ventures, an early stage fund from Singapore, which provides funding to promising startups across the South East Asia region. Segnel’s founder Hideki Fujita says, "It's natural that more and more parents are looking for support and advice in bringing up their children. Parentune provides parents with trusted advice, validated support and relevant solutions. A lot of users love parentune; there are 3 million monthly sessions across the website and app. The fact that parentune has improved continuously by listening to their users through the use of technology is their strength and uniqueness both."

Parentune is a technology centred startup with a lean team of 12 behind its scale up. Nitin talks about the parentune culture as one of the most important factors behind its progress. “Learn-fun-speed truly captures parentune’s culture. We realized the importance of culture-building early on and that meant that the team got together to curate it. Its so much better, when it’s shared and built together. We feel it’s a more sustainable approach.”