Cradlewise

Footwork's third investment is in the company helping babies and their parents get better sleep.

At Footwork, we aspire to partner with companies that truly improve their customers’ lives, and with founders who see their mission as their lives’ work. No investment exemplifies these characteristics better than Cradlewise, which today announced a $7M Series Seed round led by Footwork with CRV, SOSV, Better Capital, and angels, including Katrina Lake (founder of Stitch Fix), Jeremy Cai (founder of Italic), Dilip Goswami (CTO of Molekule), and Sonny Vu (former CEO of Misfit Wearables) as co-investors.

One of the biggest pain points for babies and their parents is getting good sleep. 60% of 6-month-olds fail to sleep through the night. New parents lose an average of 2 hours of sleep per night during a baby’s first year. Needless to say, the lack of sleep leads to many challenges for young families. Technology has entered the fray, with everything from baby monitors to rocking bassinets touting ways to help new parents and babies live better. But no product has come as close to actually solving the root of the sleep problem as Cradlewise.

The Cradlewise Smart Crib uses technology to detect when a baby is in the earliest phase of waking up, and automatically soothes the baby back to sleep by gently bouncing up and down. The product combines a bassinet, a crib, a mattress, a baby monitor with video feed, and a sleep tracker with analysis, all in one connected hardware device and an accompanying mobile application. Cradlewise was named one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2020, has garnered rave reviews from all parents who’ve used it so far, and has grown by word-of-mouth to lead to a business that is already millions of dollars in revenue. Here’s what one customer, Jackie, had to say:

I could cry tears of happiness.. he slept 12+ hrs last night and only woke up twice for a half hour each time. He ate once then went back to sleep. We have seen major improvements!

We first learned about Cradlewise from a prospective customer, our founder friend Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, and were immediately intrigued, having had a long interest in sleep technology (blog post from 2016!), and by its ability to be a “must have” product. But as we dove in, what got us more and more excited was the authentic passion and extreme determination of the company’s co-founders, Radhika Patil, CEO, and Bharath Patil, CTO. The duo are both engineers, and started to prototype the product that eventually became Cradlewise when their kids were newborns in India. They would later quit their jobs at Qualcomm and Texas Instruments to work full-time on the idea, moved to Shenzhen to figure out manufacturing, and last year, in the middle of the pandemic, moved themselves and their family to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue their entrepreneurial dream. Fast forward to today, and Cradlewise is already in the homes of hundreds of parents, who, along with their babies, are sleeping better and longer thanks to this amazing product. My family’s one of them — our newborn daughter is sleeping great, I’m sure in part thanks to Cradlewise 🙂.

Of course, Radhika and Bharath’s vision doesn’t just stop with the smart crib. Cradlewise’s initial product is already getting better thanks to software updates over time, a characteristic of the very best connected hardware companies, such as Nest, Peloton, Tesla, and Tonal. And while this product is designed for babies from 0 to 24 months, the company has the ambition to serve more kids and more parents in the future.

Bharath and Radhika Patil, co-founders of Cradlewise (center), with Nikhil Basu Trivedi (left) and Mike Smith (right), co-founders of Footwork.

A breakthrough technology-enabled product. Customers that love it and use it every day. Founders pursuing their lives’ work. The chance to build a meaningful and category-defining company. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Radhika, Bharath, and the Cradlewise team. Come join us — we’re hiring across Marketing, Operations, Product, and more.