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Melissa Goh · · 6 min readThe Parentinc bets big on offline retail with Motherswork acquisition
Parent-tech firm The Parentinc, which operates media and community platform theAsianparent, has taken a majority stake in premium mom and baby retailer Motherswork for an undisclosed sum, both companies announced today.
(Left to right) Motherswork founder and CEO Sharon Wong and The Parentinc group CEO and founder Roshni Mahtani Cheung / Photo credit: The Parentinc
The deal, a mix of cash and equity, is tranched across three years and will eventually lead to Singapore-headquartered Motherswork being fully owned by The Parentinc.
Sharon Wong, Motherswork’s CEO and founder, will stay on board, together with the rest of the team.
The acquisition tops off a series of transformations that The Parentinc – which counts East Ventures, Line Southeast Asia, JD.com, and Thailand’s Central Retail Corporation among its backers – has undergone since its early days as a media company.
It also puts the firm on a trajectory toward an IPO.
The Parentinc has raised over US$38 million to date and had a valuation of US$140 million as of its series D funding round in 2022, according to data and insights platform Alternatives.pe.
This acquisition also marks The Parentinc’s expansion to the offline segment.
“We have the data, the users, the community [but] we’ve never had a place to bring the community to – now we have a place to call home,” Roshni Mahtani Cheung, the company’s group CEO and founder, said at a press event.
Cheung could have hardly predicted the firm’s transformation from a media company to a brand when she founded theAsianparent as an online blog in 2009.
If you want to be a big brand, you must go offline.
Today, the site and mobile app have a combined reach of 30 million parents in seven markets: Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, and the Philippines. Its mobile app alone has 5.5 million registered users.
In Vietnam, the firm owns Webtretho, a social network for women, and parenting app Bé Yêu.
In 2019, The Parentinc launched its first direct-to-consumer brand Mama’s Choice, which sells pregnancy and nursing products that are made with natural ingredients and halal-certified. It was “the biggest change and transformation” of Cheung’s’ life, she tells Tech in Asia.
From media to retail
Growing a 30 million-strong community
$74 million in the next three years
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The Parentinc, which operates community platform theAsianparent, can augment Motherswork’s data on mom purchasing behavior “in real time.”
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