LactApp

The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months of a baby and each year over 3 million mothers in the US start, but by 6 months only 25% still do so. Breastfeeding looks and sounds easy and natural, but there can be many challenges that can lead a mother to quit early without her wanting to do so. Millennial new mothers seek immediate, personalized and confidential expert advice and LactApp provides a reliable, non-judgemental source of information and support. A symptom checker with 70,000+ questionnaire-like paths gives 7,000+ tailored answers and an in-app chat function is answered by our in-house team of experts. The chat is already partly automated, but our worldwide biggest dataset in the field trains AI to eventually launch a fully autonomous, expert validated virtual lactation and maternity consultant, that will be highly scalable beyond the 500,000+ downloads that we have reached so far organically.

Approximately 140 million babies are born every year and over 80% of mothers initiate breastfeeding or intent to do so globally. But suboptimal breastfeeding rates cause over 800,000 child deaths and 20,000 mothers deaths a year (Unicef, The Lancet, 2016) and improving breastfeeding rates would impact all 17 UN sustainable development goals (waba.org.my). Meanwhile, unnecessary formula milk consumption contributes to environmental degradation and climate change (Shenker, BMJ, 2019).

We mistakenly think that the problem we are facing is low breastfeeding rates, but this is only the consequence: the real problem is that women who want to breastfeed do not find the information, professional support or peer support to facilitate it. LactApp provides this in the form of a highly accessible mobile app with content created by IBCLCs (International Board Certified Lactation Consultants), nutritionists, midwives and paediatricians. 

75% of our users say that LactApp has contributed to prolonging their breastfeeding journey in our user survey and LactApp is highly likely to improve breastfeeding rates in users: this efficiency is being assessed in a clinical trial that has been approved by the ethics committee and is in progress. We also engage in scientific research in this under-researched topic of female health.

LactApp is a mobile app available on Android and iPhone smartphones, as well as on iPad and Apple watch to download for free in English or Spanish version, with Portuguese launched in Q2 2021. The mother can set up her and her baby’s personal profile by setting the date of birth of the baby and it’s weight and height and will get personalized answers based on her baby’s specific growth stage and weight. The app works like a symptom checker with many different decision trees, for example on breastfeeding pain, latching difficulties, weaning or baby’s sleep and also has custom plans (like what to do when you suspect mastitis) and tests (does my baby have tongue-tie?). Currently, this automatic content solves over 100,000 consultations a week and the over 11 million consultations so far build the base of our worldwide unique dataset, that is used for machine learning to train a model of AI, that will eventually answer to chat questions autonomously and already gives over 90% accuracy in predictions on certain topics.

LactApp’s target audience are new mothers, mostly first time mothers, but not only, who initiate breastfeeding and have questions about it, as well as healthcare professionals who support them. The app is designed to ask what are the mothers' wishes and gives suggestions and advice according to the mothers' desires and personal situation. Our expert team simultaneously works in our brick and mortar Clinic, LactApp Clinic and engages constantly in person, virtually, over our in-app chat function and through our social media channels (106k Instagram followers) with mothers. Our in-app function predicts new informational needs of mothers, for example during the coronavirus pandemic we were able to inform mothers about the implications of breastfeeding and coronavirus, as well as about the suitability of the coronavirus vaccine in breastfeeding mothers immediately. Every time we receive a high amount of questions on a certain topic, we gather scientific evidence and expert advice to inform our audience by immediately updating our in-app content. But because the evidence in lactation is often lacking, our medical team is carrying out our own scientific research, one of them about the Covid-19 vaccine in breastfeeding mothers.

LactApp supports breastfeeding mothers to reach their personal goals with practical, evidence-based information, so they can breastfeed as long as they wish. So 75% of users say that LactApp has prolonged their breastfeeding journey. This benefits the baby and mother's general health: it lowers obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure levels and also risks of certain cancers like breast cancer in mothers and childhood leukaemia on a population scale. In the case of coronavirus or any other pandemics, these health issues are all associated with increased risk to life when infected. Breastfeeding is the first preventive health measure in life.

LactApp has been founded in 2016 and is now a startup with a team of 15 people. Our App is available in Spanish and English and from next month in Portuguese and we are a revenue-generating business. LactApp has a proven track record, over 500,000 downloads and a stable active user base that regenerates itself through organic outreach and recommendations only. Whilst we are still working on proving our business model, we have already a stable income from a number of paying users and from our bootstrapping activities. We are also working with several B2B collaborations, with several more in the pipeline. 

LactApp has created the first mobile application powered by artificial intelligence in the maternity and lactation field, which is a result of the biggest data set of real-world questions from mothers and answers validated by leading experts. By putting the mother and what she wants at the centre, we have built trust amongst our users and gained worldwide unique expertise in the field of human lactation, an underserved, undereducated and under-researched area of female health, that has been overlooked by the medical community as a physiological process in the female body, because the focus is on pathologies. 

The use of artificial intelligence in the in-app chat function will make LactApp highly scalable at a lower cost, less biased, non-judgemental and of consistent quality and so it will be more efficient in helping mothers of all economic backgrounds to reach their personal breastfeeding goals. 

So far over 500,000 downloads.

Around 50,000 monthly active users now.

At the moment we are focusing on monetization and fundraising and the target amount of users will depend on our availability to raise funds / build successful B2B partnerships.

This is just counting the mothers we serve, every mother we serve has usually at least one baby (some twins and siblings) where our work impacts.

Next year/ 18 months: 1 million active users/year.

Five years: 10 million active users/year.

We have a net promoter score of 94%, 75% of mothers have prolonged their breastfeeding journey thanks to LactApp and 58% have avoided a visit to a health professional thanks to clarifying questions in LactApp. A clinical study to measure our effectiveness in raising breastfeeding rates and reduce healthcare systems costs is in progress.

We especially measure consultations, which is when a mother has a question and reaches one of the over 2,000 answers in our automatic symptom checker depending on her profile/question/problem. When the automatic symptom checker is not enough, there is an in-app chat function, where she can talk to our experts. So far we have answered over 11 million consultations, currently over 100,000 a week.

Supporting breastfeeding impacts all 17 UN sustainability goals, according to the NGO WABA (World Alliance of Breastfeeding Action): Waba Home - World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action. 

16 people full time team members:

Team - LactApp

Some of our team members work part-time in our affiliated LactApp Clinic:

Equipo - LactApp Clinic

Maria Berruezo (Co-founder and COO): second-time entrepreneur with a degree in advertising and public relations and the vision and heart of the project. She suffered a life-changing car accident, that separated her from her 5 weeks old baby (who was fine), putting a seemingly impossible challenge to her lactation journey. She succeeded to continue breastfeeding despite being in hospital for 2 months thanks to the help of now co-founder Alba Padrò and felt so empowered that she wanted to give back to every mother by downloading Alba's brain into an App.

Alba Padrò, (Co-founder and Chief Expert) is an IBCLC (International Board Certified Lactation Consultant) with over 20 years of experience, bestselling breastfeeding book author, maternity Instagram influencer (126k followers) and Co-director of a postgraduate university course in lactation management. She is a recognised speaker at international conferences and her second book about weaning has already reprinted for the third time. 

Enric Pallares (Co-founder and CEO) is a serial entrepreneur in the healthcare space, technology enthusiast and a graduate of the Advanced Management Program in Health Innovation of IESE Business School. As a gender equality champion and ally for years, he completes the founding team with his strategic, sales, finance, management and negotiation skills.

Together with Laia Aguilar, midwife and research leader, as well as Rocio Tovar, the (female) CTO and a former early user, Christiane Gross, multilingual international business development lead and other members, this team will scale LactApp rapidly and drive its growth through technological and clinical expertise.

Of our 16 team members, only two are men. Together as a team, we speak Catalan, Spanish, English, Portuguese, German and Italian. Our team members are citizens of Spain, Venezuela and Italy. Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is profound and ingrained in our organizational culture. We have recently called on our users to share with us their breastfeeding pictures so that we can reflect the diverse reality of parenting in our images.

In our app you can find for example content on how to induce lactation if you are a gay mother who has not given birth and our clinical team has supported many LGBTQ+ families. We are very aware that we need to integrate more content on different topics of our diverse users, so we have for example written about breastfeeding when fasting during Ramadan and special blog entries for black breastfeeding week. We are striving to continue our effort to offer a solution to all mothers from all cultural backgrounds.

We are not only looking for funding, but also for introductions to organisations and individuals who are interested in collaborating in clinical research on the topic of human lactation. We are also very interested in making part of the global community of solvers and connect and learn from mentors and peers. One of our barriers is also the lack of business network to get introductions to the relevant decision-makers and Solve can help us achieve these connections.

We would benefit from all areas mentioned above, but we would especially benefit from introductions to investors, new PR relations to improve our clinical reputation and mentoring on using our data.  

We are very open minded when it comes to prospective partnerships.

LactApp is proving to support new mothers in their breastfeeding journey for as long as they wish, as a very affordable, non-judgmental and non-biased technological solution. As a startup based in Spain, we also serve the Latinx community, as our content is fully available in Spanish and so the US has become organically our 3rd most important country in terms of users. Our team would invest this price to further advance our technology, localize more content for the US English and Spanish speaking user base and increase our US user base, so more mothers who need support and information in their maternity journey can benefit from our solution.

LactApp is a majority female-founded company, two out of three cofounders are women and mothers and LactApp's mission is to improve mothers breastfeeding and maternity experience by providing them with support and empower them with research-based information in their maternity journey.

We would dedicate the "Innovation for Women" price entirely to our research projects: we are currently conducting research on mastitis, a breast infection that occurs during lactation. This is one of the biggest problems that can arise during lactation and one of the leading causes for quitting before the mother was ready to do so. Clinical research and medical solutions, as well as diagnostics for this pathology, are desperately needed in this under-funded and under-researched topic of women's health. There are 10,171 research papers on mastitis in cows, 1,358 on sheep and goats and only 1,000 on women in the database of pubmed.gov. 

We would commit the funds of this price entirely to research and development to create innovation in early detection technology of mastitis in breastfeeding mothers.

LactApp is using machine learning to develop a virtual lactation and maternity consultant chatbot, called "Valba" from "virtual Alba" after our co-founder lactation expert and bestselling book author Alba Padro. A data set of maternity questions from over 500,000 mothers users have been generated by our freemium version of the App and is at the base of this machine learning model. Our PhD in Artificial Intelligence team member has been working on this project for over 2 years and our goal is to create a non-judgmental and least possible biased model, that can answer mothers in real-time and point them to the relevant expert content to answer their personal, individual maternity question. The model is being validated by our in-house experts of international board-certified lactation consultants (IBCLC), midwives, paediatricians, nutritionists and psychologists. Currently, the AI achieves around 90% of accuracy in predicting suitable answers in maternity areas, for example breastfeeding pain. 

LactApp would use the funds from this price to further develop this machine learning model, so it can be launched within our App and benefit mothers to empower them to breastfeed as long as they wish to.