Bellabeat Lands $4.5M Seed Round To Grow Its Quantified Self App For Pregnancy

Bellabeat, the startup that launched earlier this year with a system to help moms-to-be to track their pregnancies, has closed on a $4.5 million round of funding.

The investment, which counts as Bellabeat’s seed round, comes from a roster of angel investing heavyweights: SVAngel, CrunchFund, Nicolas Berggruen, Paul Buchheit, Justin Kan, Michael Seibel, Universal Music Group, Cherubic Ventures, Promus Ventures, Yi Pin NG, Boon Hwee Koh, Adrian Aoun and others. Bellabeat was part of the winter 2014 class of Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, where it was voted the “most likely to succeed” by others in its cohort.

Bellabeat’s flagship product is a “connected system” that includes a small $129 device that attaches to an iPhone or Android smartphone and lets expectant moms hear, record, and share their baby’s heartbeat anytime. The Bellabeat app also helps women track other aspects of their pregnancies, such as weight gain and how often the baby kicks.

Essentially, Bellabeat is like a FitBit for pregnancy — and if there’s ever a time when someone wants to keep track of everything going on with her body, it’s when she’s got a baby on the way.

Bellabeat co-founder Urska Srsen tells me that the new funding will be put toward building the next generation of the Bellabeat product, and working to introduce real-time patient monitoring for obstetricians. Bellabeat currently has 15 staff, nine of whom are engineers. Hiring will also be a focus in the coming months, Srsen said.

In March, Srsen stopped by TechCrunch headquarters to give us a hands-on look at the Bellabeat system and how it works. Watch that in the video embedded below.