Ovuline raises $1.1M and launches Ovia Pregnancy
Ovia Pregnancy is the pregnancy app of the Quantified Self era
The key to a safe pregnancy is simple: you just need to relax. But make sure to stay active. But not too active or you might strain yourself. And make sure to eat frequent meals so you gain enough weight. But don’t gain too much weight. So eat lots of fruits and vegetables. But watch out for salmonella and listeria outbreaks in spinach, cantaloupe, tomatoes, bagged lettuce, and peanut butter. So don’t eat any food from Mexico. Or the U.S. You’re really just better off growing your own food. But don’t touch the soil because you might get exposed to cat poop and kill your baby!
There are plenty of resources out there for pregnant women to work themselves up into a frenzied terror with, but a new app is launching today to help women stay on top of everything.
Ovia Pregnancy is the new pregnancy tracking app released by fertility tracker Ovuline, which has leveraged the Quantified Self movement to help couples conceive. CEO Paris Wallace said previously that the obvious next step for Ovuline was a pregnancy tracker, and today, Ovia Pregnancy was unveiled. Ovuline also raised $1.1 million in an inside round from existing investors, bringing the total raised to $2.75 million.
The app epitomizes the Quantified Self by tracking mood, symptoms, weight gain, exercise level, nutrition, sleep patterns and more. Unlike other pregnancy tracking apps, all of the information provided in the Ovia app is customized to each user based on her due date, pre-pregnancy BMI, and the symptoms and updates that you plug in.
The app even comes with critical alert system to notify you if the symptoms you’re reporting are indicative of a problem like preeclampsia or anemia.
And of course, there’s a food and medication safety database, which allows users to identify which foods and medications are safe during pregnancy (a very tricky road to navigate when even over-the-counter drugs like Ibuprofen are off-limits). The database includes over 2,500 different foods and some 800 medications, color-coded by FDA guidelines for consumption safety during pregnancy.
CEO Paris Wallace says that the ability to connect with other pregnant women directly is in the works for version two of the app, but for now, users are able to share data via email, Facebook, Twitter and text. The app also gives users an idea for how their symptoms compare with those of other users. For example, you report backaches at 12 weeks, and the app will tell you that 21% of Ovia users reported backaches at 12 weeks.
“We’re thinking big: connections that link pre-conception health and symptoms during pregnancy to the child’s development in infancy,” said Wallace. “Thanks to our proprietary personal health platform, we have amazing analytical potential – we can uncover insights that will shape the health of future generations.”
The Ovuline fertility app has over 150,000 users who have reported over 25 million data points. The app is growing at a rate of one million data points every three days.