Owlet Baby Care Receives $7M in New Funding, Product to Launch This Fall
PROVO, Utah, Aug. 18, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Owlet Baby Care, maker of the Smart Sock baby monitor, received an additional $7 million in funding, CEO Kurt Workman announces. The additional money comes as the company prepares for the public launch of its product this fall after two years of development and rigorous safety testing.
Of the $7 million, $6 million is from the company's Series A funding. The Series A round was led by Formation 8 (F8), with participation from Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, out of his new fund Carpe Diem VC, and Owlet's previous investors Azimuth Ventures, ffvc, Eniac Ventures and Peak Capital. Formation 8 has a new $100-million hardware fund headed up by Lior Susan.
"We could not be happier to work with F8," Workman said. "There is no other venture capital firm that has more real world experience in hardware than F8. This is an exciting time at Owlet."
Owlet is also receiving another $1 million for participating in a government National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant. This grant and the Series A fundraising brings the total amount Owlet has raised to $9.2 million.
"There is no way that we could have raised our funds without pushing the entire company to the sole focus of creating an amazing product for parents," Owlet co-founder Jordan Monroe said. "Our new investor, Lior, was able to use the Owlet with his baby, as well as all of our competitors' products, and he fell in love with the Owlet Monitor. That was the biggest factor in making this investment happen."
The company is currently ramping up to make its Smart Sock available to the public, planned for this fall. The product is currently only available to early supporters and new supporters in limited production.
"This is going to be a crazy two years—we are planning to triple the size of the company and hopefully be in 50,000 homes by mid-2017," Monroe said.
More information about employment opportunities is available at OwletCare.com/Jobs.
The Owlet Smart Sock is the first of its kind among new smart baby monitors, aimed at giving parents peace of mind. The baby product market currently has monitors that require you to obsess over whether or not your child is OK because the monitors use only audio and video. The Owlet Baby Monitor tracks an infant's vital signs, including heart rate and oxygen levels, with the same technology used in hospitals—pulse oximetry—to alert you if your baby stops breathing, so that you have one less thing to worry about. The information from the monitor is relayed to parents' smartphones, allowing parents to check on their child from anywhere.
About Owlet Baby Care
Owlet Baby Care, Inc. was founded in 2013 by a team of passionate parents who wanted to bring themselves—and other parents around the globe—peace of mind and assurance by developing a monitor that tracks a baby's breathing and heart rate in real time. Using pulse oximetry, the same technology used in hospitals, the Owlet Smart Sock will send alerts, to the Base Station and via WiFi to a smartphone, if a baby were to stop breathing in the middle of the night or during nap time. The Owlet Baby Monitor is not a medical device. See the device in action by watching this video or visiting OwletCare.com.
SOURCE Owlet Baby Care, Inc.
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