Career product manager Amanda DeLuca has launched a parenting management app, Riley, born out of her own experience with parental anxiety and feedback from other families.
DeLuca, who previously at Google, Nerdwallet, and Eventbrite, in addition to Etsy, became pregnant three years ago. At the time, she and her husband, who is also a product manager, began to consume a range of materials to prepare for parenting life.
However, when they finally had their daughter, the parents realized that despite their knowledge consumption, they were not prepared. The couple then turned to the internet for answers, and what they found wasn't efficient enough.
"Parents in the U.S. are having a hard time in terms of using existing solutions to track events for their babies and find answers around parenting. In my experience, these solutions are content-dense and tech-poor. So I thought this is a massively overlooked area," DeLuca told TechCrunch over a call.
Riley, which is now in public beta, has two main functions.
First, it lets you track things like sleep, diaper changes, vaccines, and feeding and provides you AI-powered insights like the best times for the baby to nap or why their naps are getting shorter.
Second, is an AI-powered answer platform for parents that claims to provide personalized solutions based on the data entered by parents. The company is using medical and psychological studies and has appointed a clinical board to grow its database for answers.
"Our differentiation is that we marry different data points that you have provided as parents with science-backed knowledge. We have a very high bar in terms of the quality of data that we ingest in our knowledge base," DeLuca said.
Currently, Riley has a short onboarding process that asks parents about themselves, their children, their parenting style, and co-caregivers for the baby. In the future, the company plans to make onboarding more extensive so the app can provide personalized suggestions from the start. Over time, Riely will ask parents about personality traits that a baby might be developing for additional insights.
During the public beta phase, Riley has one subscription plan with a 30-day trial with different prices based on billing time. The subscription costs $14.99 for a month, $11.99 per month for a quarter, or $9.99 per month for a year, depending on which option you choose.
The company plans to move out of the public beta later this year and introduce training guides for the parents, like one focused on sleep training for babies.
The startup is another example of the growing trend of apps that want different parts of your life, such as nutrition or conversations, to build a personalized knowledge base and use AI to augment that with existing knowledge to provide answers. The company has competition in apps like the sleep-tracking app Huckleberry and family management app Maple.
To scale its business and user base, Riley raised $3.1 million in a seed round led by True Ventures with participation from Flybridge and Next Wave NYC. True Ventures' Natasha Sharma, who is joining Riley's board, said that the app can provide science-based parental advice that is much sought-after.
"In the age of content saturation, parents, in particular, face the challenge of knowing where to ask their most pressing and intimate questions," Sharma noted, in a statement. "General searches and forums can result in a maze of conflicting answers. Amanda's own experience as a parent led her to create a solution that families actually want to use -- a platform that delivers science-backed advice tailored to each family's context, helping families thrive with guidance that evolves as they do," she added.
