Maternify, the leading platform for online and at-home pregnancy and postpartum support services, has closed its first round of funding of €460,000.
The operation has been led by investors such as Juan Abarca, president of HM Hospitales, Kike Corral (ThePower Business School and Gopick), and Alejandro Castillejo (Head of Sanitas Ventures), among others.
This startup allows a midwife to visit you at home in less than two hours to help you with your breastfeeding.
Founded by midwife and influencer Carla Quintana and Álvaro Ayllón, the company is part of the Lanzadera acceleration program in Valencia. However, its headquarters are in the Google for Startups space in Madrid.
Maternify’s solution aims to address a need that, in countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom, is offered through the public health system.
In Spain, it does not exist either in the National Health Service or in private hospitals.
It is a program of home and online pregnancy and postpartum care, which consists of socio-health care through which midwives, as the initial point of contact, assist the pregnant woman in her home to provide health, emotional, multidisciplinary, and team-based accompaniment.
Álvaro Ayllón, CEO and co-founder of Maternify, explains, “when this is done by the public health system, by visiting all kinds of homes, situations such as possible postpartum depression, hygiene deficits, signs of gender violence, etc. can be identified.
“We are setting it up as a complementary service, not a substitute for the general channels through which a pregnancy or postpartum is managed in any hospital or health center”, he adds.
What Maternity does is that any pregnant woman or new mother has a midwife in her home when she wants, needs, or requests one, not when it is her turn.
Maternify’s business model
The services most in demand by Maternify’s customers are postpartum home visits, newborn earrings, and sleep plans.
As they report, since they started in 2019, they have been doubling their turnover every year and have already served more than 2,000 families.
According to Carla, “We are seeing more and more families contracting multiple services with us for the same pregnancy or baby and the percentage of mothers who repeat for their next pregnancy is very high”.
Maternify has a network of associated independent healthcare professionals, currently more than a hundred, present in more than 40 Spanish cities.
This allows them “to have a thermometer of how they are doing in many hospitals, to be able to advise mothers in this regard,” says Ayllón.
The professionals assigned, when they have days off with no on-call duty in their hospitals, provide this service.
Maternify has a multidisciplinary team made up of midwives, gynecologists, pediatricians, nutritionists, physiotherapists, perinatal psychologists, and sleep specialists, among others.
According to Carla Quintana, maternity in Spain is far from being as good as it could be. She says: “We are thousands of midwives short in Spain to reach the ratio of 25 per 1,000 births recommended by the WHO”.
“And, besides, there is still too much obstetric violence in the delivery room. In fact, the latest study by the Observatory of Obstetric Violence, which is already a very bad symptom, concluded that more than 40% of women say they have suffered it in one of their pregnancies or births. What’s more, I myself see it very often”.
