Baby registry and product discovery platform Babylist today announced that it has acquired health and wellness tool Expectful for an undisclosed price. The deal, announced today, brings together two companies focused on supporting parents to help them navigate everything from eco-friendly diapers to fertility-related mental health.
However, duplication is more than missions. His two CEOs of the company have invested in each other’s final venture capital rounds. Natalie Gordon, her CEO and founder of Babylist, has written a check to her $3 million seed round for Expectful in 2021. CEO Natalie Walton invested in Babylist’s final round, with a $40 million Series C closing the same year.
The two founders haven’t publicly disclosed the purchase price, but the venture capitalist certainly has an answer. Babylist has raised her $50 million in known funding from investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Halogen Ventures, 500 Global, Next Play Capital and Marcy Venture Partners. Expectful has raised over $4.2 million for her from investors including Harlem Capital. Indicator Ventures, Sequoia Scout Fund, Break Trail Ventures, Chinagona Ventures.
The long-term vision for the newly merged company is for Babylist to transform its relationship with its audience and become a larger health and wellness media property, Gordon said. Expectful will continue as a standalone website, but Gordon hinted that much of the content will eventually be accessible for free, unlike his model of subscriber-oriented business currently being touted. .
“Having a baby is so wonderful. It’s also overwhelming and lonely,” Gordon said. their physical, mental and emotional health are much more important.” With Expectful, the company is able to speak to its audience in a way that makes no sense to the registry side of its tech-powered business. she said.
Babylist’s ambitions for expansion may be partly due to revenue growth. The company said he made more than $240 million in revenue in 2021, but for the record he had no share in 2022 revenue. According to the company, in the past year he has purchased more than 8 million people from his Babylist.
Walton became CEO less than a year after being an Expectful user. She first joined as an advisor to Expectful and saw it as an opportunity for her to be entrepreneurial, even though she had a stressful pregnancy and gave birth to her son just weeks before. Soon, her then-CEO and founder of Expectful, Mark Krassner, saw her as a key figure to lead the business as she reoriented her product strategy to grow beyond recorded meditations. In her past interview, Walton explained her Expectful’s plan to mimic her Peloton’s playbook of matching community with premium her content.
Currently, the entrepreneur remains on Babylist as an advisor to the board of directors. She says she always thought the company’s exit looked like a merger with a partner in the digital health space.
“This acquisition allows us to have a much greater impact than if we remained focused on our bottom line,” Walton said. “Women need our products and they need our solutions now. There is no time to wait to go the route of continuing to grow revenues and doing an IPO. Prioritize impact. I don’t, I think enough startups think that way.
