Parental anxiety — there’s an app for that 

New parents are a notoriously stressed-out, sleep-deprived, barfed-on demographic: all qualities that can be pretty lucrative.

Newborn care app Sprouty recently closed a $550k seed round. It offers AI-backed support for key parenting elements — from weight tracking to figuring out why your baby is crying (with 80% accuracy, allegedly). 

And Sprouty is just one app in a growing market, with many focused on older kids:

• Bark, a parental phone control app, allows parents to keep tabs on their kids' screen time and flags alarming communication. 
• Cozi, essentially a child-friendly Google Calendar, keeps parents and kids aligned on day-to-day scheduling.
• Joy Parenting Club recently raised $14m to scale its AI-powered parenting assistant and double its 50k member base. 

Baby tracker apps account for just under 30% of the market, and the industry as a whole is expected to grow to over $6B by 2035, from $1.7B in 2024. 

The sector is blowing up, but these baby care apps raise a few eyebrows — a big question being, "Do they alleviate or compound the anxiety they profit from?"

An anxious bunch 

Millennial parents deal with a lot — even beyond the conventional troubles that come with keeping a tiny, fragile, easily scarred-for-life human being alive. 

A recent report from the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago found:

• 46% feel burned out. 
• 58% say they struggle to balance their work and home life
• 85% believe social media creates unrealistic parenting expectations.

And while a lot of parents are clearly feeling anxious, it remains to be seen whether or not technology is the solution. 

It is, however, if you ask OpenAI CEO and new dad Sam Altman, who said he can’t imagine raising a newborn without ChatGPT.  

Special shoutout Huckleberry’s reported 5m+ users, many of whom are proudly logging 45-minute stretches of sleep at 2am. We see you.