This Fulbright scholar from Harvard built an app so new mothers could keep their sanity

Photo credit: Vera Kratochvil

The Great Indian Joint Family, as shown by Bollywood, has been found only on silver screens for long time now.

At last count, there were about 172 million nuclear families in India. That is, a family that is made of a couple and their dependent children (if any), as opposed to this idea of a family that is as alien to young Indians as ET itself.

And if you ask BabyChakra’s Naiyya Saggi, she will tell you that number is almost seventy percent of the country’s population.

The Fulbright scholar from Harvard Business School founded BabyChakra along with Mohit Kumar as a social discovery platform for young and lost mothers after she realized how helpless new parents could feel trying to do things right, and how hard it can be to get dependable advice in the modern urban family setting.

“The genesis of this is that if you look at how mothers learn, it is a social discovery. They ask their friends, their own mothers, mothers in law, and neighbors. Now, given that most of us today live in nuclear families, we don’t get that support system around us and we are turning more and more online,” Naiyya told Tech In Asia.

Naiyya saw her friends go through the same struggle as they started making families, and decided to launch a company to help.

“On the BabyChakra app we tell you what mothers around you are discovering and doing. You can see reviews on pediatricians, daycare, hobby schools, and you can follow other mothers and learn what their experience at particular places has been,” she said.

Momstars to keep you sane

The team. Photo credit: BabyChakra

BabyChakra was launched with a closed beta in August 2014, and has come some ways since then. A part of Microsoft Venture’s latest accelerator program, the company raised about US$600,000 in seed funding.

Its android app launched a couple of months ago. In all, Naiyya expects to hit half a million users this month.

Users get help making decisions on doctors, hospitals, cord blood banks, playschools, activities, events, products and even kid friendly restaurants, while forming communities on the basis of their stage of parenthood and the neighborhood they live in.

Content is generated by anyone on the platform, and by what Naiyya calls “Momstars” – super users who have been curated by Naiyya and her team to work as evangelists for the app.

The money talk