Direct-to-consumer beauty startup MyGlamm has scooped up parenting platform BabyChakra to foray into the mother and baby personal care market. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
As part of the deal, Naiyya Saggi, founder and CEO of BabyChakra, will join MyGlamm as co-founder and president. She will also join the MyGlamm board and head the four-year-old startup’s mother and baby care vertical.
After this acquisition, MyGlamm and BabyChakra will invest INR 1 billion (USD 13.4 million) in building a “mother-and-baby content-to-commerce platform” over the next three years, the two companies said in a statement on Tuesday.
The acquisition talks started in 2020, while the entire process took about six months, the statement noted, adding that the deal was finalized last week. The development comes three weeks after MyGlamm closed a USD 71.3 million Series C round, which it had kicked off earlier in March, to scale its business across the South Asian market.
This is the second acquisition by MyGlamm, which was founded in 2017 and counts Amazon, Accel, Ascent Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Trifecta, and Strides Venture, among others, as backers. Last year, the Mumbai-based startup bought women-focused content and influencer platform POPxo, which reportedly had 50 million female users at the time, for an undisclosed amount, to cut down on its customer acquisition costs.
The acquisition of six-year-old BabyChakra—an online platform for pregnancy and childcare that lets users connect with other parents and experts and buy relevant services and products—will help MyGlamm expand its offerings, reach, and customer base.
“With this acquisition, MyGlamm ventures into the mom-babycare segment and will continue to expand…and become the largest content-community-commerce company in South Asia along with POPxo and BabyChakra,” said Darpan Sanghvi, founder and CEO of MyGlamm, in an interview with wire service Press Trust of India.
Currently, MyGlamm is present in 70 Indian cities and towns across online and offline channels. It expects to clock an annualized revenue of INR 7.5 billion (USD 100 million) by the end of this year, the company said. BabyChakra, which boasts an online community of over 25 million families and 3,500 doctors on its platform, will continue to operate as a standalone brand with an aim to reach an INR 5 billion (USD 67 million) revenue run rate in the next three years.
“The e-commerce journey of BabyChakra is new for us, and that’s where the alignment with MyGlamm comes from. So far, we have been building our digital assets with parents and doctors and have been identifying latent needs that mothers have,” Saggi said. “With MyGlamm, we wish to co-create products with our community of mothers and doctors at scale and use MyGlamm’s expertise for product development and distribution.”
Over the next year, MyGlamm plans to have a portfolio of more than 80 baby personal care products such as washes, lotions, and creams under BabyChakra, half of which the company will launch this year, said a report by local media Mint. The move is expected to bump up its revenues.
The mother-baby products category is one of the fastest-growing categories in India’s beauty and personal care segment. Under MyGlamm, BabyChakra will compete with other D2C players like Mamaearth and The Moms Co., as well as other more established brands, including Johnson & Johnson and Himalaya Herbals.
