Smart Cribs Maker Secures $7M Funding

American smart cribs manufacturer Cradlewise has secured $7 million funding to help new parents with baby sleep.

Venture capital firm Footwork led the $7 million seed round. Others who are participating in the round include CRV, Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake, Italic CEO Jeremy Cai, Molekule CTO Dilip Goswani, and former Misfit Wearables CEO Sonny Vu, and existing investors SOSV and Better Capital.

Cradlewise produces smart cribs with AI-powered baby monitors to understand a baby's sleep patterns and adapt to their changing needs. It integrates a crib, bassinet, and monitor, and "spots the first signs of wakeup of the baby and starts rocking automatically along with soothing music to safeguard sleep."

Footwork co-founder Mike Smith said baby care had always been a challenge, but the pandemic had made it even worse for new parents. "Cradlewise is on a mission to help sleep-deprived parents so that they can spend more quality wake time with babies," Smith said.

Cradlewise co-founders Radhika and Bharath Patil said they invented Cradlewise to solve the sleep challenges they faced when their first child was born. They had experienced sleepless nights with their first-born child.

"There are 50 baby monitors on the market that will notify you when your baby wakes up. That's too late. When my husband and I had our first baby, we quickly learned that we ran over and rocked her as soon as she twitched. You can't do that every time — you can't watch the baby 24/7. Why isn't there a crib that can monitor for signs of waking," Radhika Patil said." Many of the cribs available in the market are not intuitive in the way the[y] would rock the child. So we modeled our motion after the way I would bounce our children at 3 am on a yoga ball."

Radhika Patil said they were excited to work with such venture capital firms and angel investors with a deep understanding of connected hardware and the consumer market. "We believe that Cradlewise is uniquely positioned in this competitive space as the only smart sleep product designed to impact an outcome and not just give notifications," Radhika Patil said. "We will continue to lead in this space by expanding the capabilities of the product in the areas of a baby's health and safety."

As a working mom of three, Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake said she was excited to see the next generation of solutions for kids come from parents themselves. "Hearing Radhika's founding inspiration, to build a crib for her baby to solve the sleep challenges she experienced balancing work and family, it is a mission and product I instantly connected with," Lake said.