



The algorithm of a cry: How startups are turning baby whimpers into data
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mahek Mody and his wife were looking forward to having their first child. But the couple knew they would have their hands full once the baby arrived, juggling late-night feeds, diaper changes, soothing the infant to sleep, and managing workplace demands. Mody runs Upliance, a hardware startup, and his wife had her own demanding business to return to as a co-founder.And so, they turned to a smart crib, made by Cradlewise, a company they already knew from the hardware world.“It’s a fairly expensive purchase and we thought about it 20 times,” Mody said.
The smart crib costs around ₹1.6 lakh. But eventually they decided it was best to be prepared and ordered it.Within two days of his birth, he was sleeping in it. The early months, when most parents pace hallways, rocking babies in the dark, played out differently in their home.
The crib’s motion picked up where their arms left off. A built-in webcam narrated the baby’s small routines and even a TV murmuring in the same room didn’t disturb him as the white noise in-built in the crib cancelled it out.In Kolkata, Trisha Bhattacharjee, an advertising professional now 10 months postpartum, remembers the moment she stumbled upon Pukaar.ai, a parenting-tech startup. A week after delivery, as she was scrolling through Facebook during a break in the baby’s bawling, she saw an ad for Pukaar and downloaded the app.
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