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Business News/ Companies / People/  HarbourVest’s Jaganath Swamy joins health wearable start-up
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HarbourVest’s Jaganath Swamy joins health wearable start-up

Swamy, who led lndia, SE Asia investments for HarbourVest, has joined as CEO at wellness start-up Good Parents

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Jaganath Swamy, vice-president at HarbourVest Partners, a global private equity fund of funds with over $50 billion in assets under management, has left the firm.

Swamy, who led lndia and South-East Asia investments for HarbourVest, has joined as the chief executive of Good Parents Inc., a health and wellness start-up operating out of San Francisco and Hong Kong.

“Good Parents is focused on enhancing child development and growth via building an ecosystem around engaging parents, health insurance companies, corporate benefit programmes and schools," Swamy said in an interview from Hong Kong.

“Our first product is the Kiddo, the world’s first health and wellness wearable focused on young kids (3-10 years). The Kiddo tracks key biometrics of children and provides health, well-being, stress and development insights in real time via an app," said Swamy.

Good Parents was co-founded in late 2015 by Swamy, along with Jean Rintoul and Bo Vargas.

Rintoul was one of the founding members of Basis, the wearable technology company which was acquired by Intel Corp. for over $100 million in 2014, where she worked on algorithms and hardware for the Basis B1 and co-authored several patents.

Vargas was the founding chief technology officer of Quanttus, the blood pressure tracking company which came out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was invested in by Khosla Ventures and Matrix Partners.

Good Parents currently has eight employees in the Bay Area and three in Hong Kong. It has raised $2 million till date in seed funding from Jayesh Parekh and Prem Kumar of Jungle Ventures, Fireside Ventures (Kanwaljit Singh, ex-Helion Ventures), Biosensors International Ltd, Alto Partners and several marque angels across Asia and the US. It has also partnered with Samsung and key advisers at the Health and Food Institute of the University of California, Davis, for enhancing product functionality.

The company is now looking to expand its operations in India and is exploring setting up an operations back-office, potential manufacturing capacity and distribution tie-ups in India.

The healthcare wearable market is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years.

According to an April report from research firm Tractica, worldwide shipments for healthcare wearables will increase from 2.5 million in 2016 to 97.6 million units annually by 2021. By the end of that period, Tractica forecasts that the global healthcare wearables market will account for $17.8 billion in yearly revenue.

“The market for healthcare wearables is very much in its infancy, though there is a considerable amount of activity across the healthcare value chain," said Aditya Kaul, research director at Tractica.

Swamy’s is the latest high-profile exit in the PE industry in Asia.

Last year, Anand Prasanna, head of Asia for Morgan Creek, left to start an India-focused venture fund called Iron Pillar, along with Mohanjit Jolly of Draper Fisher Juvertson and Sameer Nath of Citibank. Iron Pillar is currently raising $150 million and has also closed several early deals. Prior to this, Menka Sajnani of Auda Private Equity LLC left to join Google in Singapore and has now moved to Jungle Ventures.

HarbourVest has more than 280 employees, including 80 investment professionals, deployed in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US. The team has committed more than $25 billion to newly-formed funds, completed over $11 billion in secondary purchases, and invested $4 billion directly in operating companies.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Swaraj Singh Dhanjal
" Based in Mumbai, Swaraj Singh Dhanjal is responsible for Mint’s corporate news coverage. For the past eight years he has been writing on the biggest deals in private equity, venture capital, IPO market and corporate mergers and acquisitions. An engineer and an MBA, he started his journalism career in 2014 with Mint. "
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Published: 23 Aug 2016, 12:51 AM IST
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