Bellabeat – the epitome of our vision
Shift Conference 2013, Babywatch came, pitched us up and conquered! If you still haven’t heard about ambitious duo that enticed the world with their innovative and modern design and technology, now is your chance.
Bellabeat is a pregnancy tracking system that rethinks the pregnancy experience. The team believes that by giving women a way to autonomously track and share their pregnancy experience, this engaging, comforting and enjoyable at-home experience will become a part of the contemporary prenatal care...
Success timeline
The two founding partners, Urška Sršen - a trained sculptor, and Sandro Mur - an engineer, entered the business world in mid-2013 with the product BabyWatch, precursor of Bellabeats Shell, by making a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo. Soon afterwards, they entered the Shift 2013 Challenge. Sandro and Urška pitched their Babywatch project which consisted of a hardware device and a smartphone application that allows parents to monitor their unborn child’s heartbeat. Their potential was recognized by the judges at Shift Conference and they won the first prize, competing against 32 other projects.
But they didn’t stop there. They kept pressing on, and had success at the Pioneers Festival 2013 in Vienna. Nobody could’ve anticipated what would come next. In December, they joined Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Stripe and many other start-ups in Y Combinator, founded by Paul Graham. There they passed the mentoring program, changed their name from BabyWatch to Bellabeat, upgraded capabilities and features, and in the process raised a $4.5M seed round from renowned Silicon Valley investors.
Bellabeat now
In 2014 they had 25 employees, now they have grown to 80. Their main office is in Zagreb, but they also have a sales office in San Francisco and a production office in China, and they are still growing. Co-founder Sandro Mur claims that they aim to create a unicorn startup that will be worth a billion dollars, which is higher than Agrokor and the Atlantic Group – flagships of the Croatian industry.
They were declared the best European health start-up as part of the prestigious ‘The Europa’s awards’ that recognizes the best technology companies all over the continent. Also, by the choice of TechCrunch, they are one the most interesting companies to keep an eye on.
Bellabeat products
Bellabeat offers a fitness tracker called Leaf, a smart scale for before, during, and after pregnancy called Balance, and Shell - a revised version of the original hardware that lets pregnant mothers listen to their baby's heartbeat.
Be our next success story
Sandro Mur and Urška Sršen are living proof that anything is possible when you combine hard work and dedication to your goals! So if you have something that you put your mind to, the Shift Conference is the place to be. We hope you empower us with an opportunity to talk about your success story next year.
If you don't have any ideas yet, dont’ worry, maybe some of this year's speakers will inspire you with their stories. Representatives from companies like Amazon, Docker, Shazam, Uber, Trello, Automatic, GitLab, Cloud66, Localystics, Intercom, Autodesk, Five, Toptal and many more will be in Split, June 2nd & June 3rd, and they had been where you are now at one point.
Authors: Maja Grmuša, Anita Ževrnja, Marina Kasalo