The Team
As an all-woman founding team, it is an honour to be invited to talk about ourselves to the Society of Women Engineers. We are 3 women technologists who are best friends and love babies. We are the perfect team not just because one of us has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell or because of our previous startup experience. We are the perfect team because we were the highly qualified baby-sitters for our friends and family for the past 10 years of our lives. Aardra Kannan Ambili, our CTO, is an AI researcher from the University of Georgia. She started her career at DudeGenie an IIT start up and then went on to co-found Ray with Sanchi Poovaya and Ranjana Nair. Sanchi, head of production and operations, is a Mechanical Engineer with a graduate degree from Cornell University. She has previously worked with Wipro Technologies and co-founded a start-up called 21st Century Odyssey (XXICO) with Ranjana Nair, CEO. Ranjana has a degree in Computer Engineering, and before her start-up journey, worked with technology giants such as Microsoft and Accenture.
The Journey
Ray has come a long way from the idea stage to a working product. While product development has been key, the team has gone a long way with getting the word out there and gaining recognition. We came in second in the Unitus Seed Fund Starthealth competition and were later selected to be part of the first edition of the Oracle Start-up Cloud Accelerator. In addition, the team spent four months in Shenzhen, China in the HAX accelerator programme. HAX is the world’s biggest hardware accelerator and Ray was its first Indian investment. Ray is now ready to launch, with the Kickstarter campaign going live on January 31st. We would like to move forward collecting pre-orders via our Kickstarter and getting feedback about our product from moms who are engineers. We aim to build a safe, baby-friendly product. We are supported by Johnson & Johnson and HAX as part of their joint consumer device health accelerator program. J&J is helping us create a more market ready and baby friendly product. We use clinically-tested and FDA approved components. We are launching our product in Kickstarter in 2-3 days. We want the backing of a community who believes technology can make lives easier for stressed out parents. We are offering 100 units for $99. Pledge your support and be part of the Raybaby community. Please Sign Up on our website at Rayiot.org
We created a non-contact sleep and wellness tracker for babies. Currently, doctors track respiration rate by placing their hand on the babies chest and counting breaths manually – which is an obsolete and inefficient way. Our solution doesn’t require any kind of electronic device on the baby’s body- which is a huge relief since parents can now sleep safe and not worry about exploding Li-ion batteries.
Our smart baby product called Raybaby notifies parents/caregivers/daycare centers:
- when your baby rolls over,
- when your baby is awake,
- when your baby is sleepy, or sleeping.
This is especially crucial to first-time parents since sleep training is a major issue.