Male founders are rarely questioned about their capacity to move on after becoming fathers, but female founders are still assessed. So, what happened when Naiyya Saggi, the founder of BabyChakra, became the end-user of the product she developed?
How the story began
Naiyya Saggi is a graduate of Harvard Business School (MBA 2012), where she was Fulbright and J.N. Tata is a professor and has served for over four years at the McKinsey & Bridgespan Group in Boston.
As all of her peers were parents and became overwhelmed by the unfamiliar challenge of seeking solutions, she found a variety of Facebook groups that had issues ranging from childcare to pediatrics. Therefore, this Harvard scholar was then encouraged to launch BabyChakra; a website that lets parents explore and interact with local maternity and childcare facilities.
Entrepreneurship wagon
Chakra in BabyChakra means a process or ‘life cycle,’ as Saggi points out, in which all facilities for babies and baby care are available on the website.
To the founders’ shock and excitement, investors including Mumbai Angels and Singapore Angel Network became involved early on. “Once we were sponsored, we used the funds to develop and deliver an app in mid-December 2015. In short, there have been 7500 downloads in less than one month. There is a very high degree of dedication, “Saggi says.
BabyChakra was launched in November 2014, and today is the fastest growing platform for Indian parents. BabyChakra allows parents to explore and interact with nearby maternity and childcare facilities. It has rapidly expanded to cover three cities in India – Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi, and this June it launched an angel funding round led by Mumbai Angels.
“I knew that I was going to do something that would have an effect on a generation. I’ve been looking for a reason in my life for a long time, and I’ve stumbled on realization, “says Saggi. With scientific accuracy, she explains what she had to do to make her vision come true. “Will and determination alone will encourage me to do something new that will have an effect on the scale,” she says.
Saggi, whose future her mother was afraid of, had taken a JN Tata and a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard Business School. “Harvard has been a dream to me, and it remains so to most of the people I know. This is multicultural. I enjoyed academics here as well, “she says. At HBS, Saggi was working on health care interventions and how to scale them up.
