How Victoria helps pregnant women

It was a bold step. After a successful career in the venture capital sector, Victoria Engelhardt stepped into the entrepreneurial world with a solid idea in mind: to offer support to women for the duration of their pregnancies. From there, Keleya was born.

Engelhardt’s desire to ensure that pregnant women can easily find the help they need at any time grew after the experience of a close friend of hers. It was clear that for many women, pregnancy can be a time of insecurity and loneliness.

While her experience in the venture capital sector would prove valuable in setting up her own business, Engelhardt took a cautious approach. “I always knew that I wanted to go into business startup, but at the time I didn’t feel ready,” she says.

It wasn’t until she decided to travel and take a yoga teacher training course in India that she connected all the dots about pursuing her project. “During my time in India, I thought long and hard about what would make me happy in the end,” Engelhardt recalls. She settled on a guiding principle that would shape not only the app she was about to create, but her own life too. “It’s all about feeling good; it’s about a good relationship and a healthy body.”

Combining this philosophy with her career expertise, Engelhardt was finally ready to create Keleya, an app designed to empower women and help them have a healthy and relaxed pregnancy.

“Making the world a better place, to some extent,” Engelhardt says while discussing the main driving force behind the app. This is also the principle that continually motivates the team behind the app: “The social aspect is the reason why the people in my team chose us over another company that might have made a better offer,” she continues.

Besides a determined team, a strong network has been key to Keleya’s growth and Engelhardt is well aware of this: “We’re building a product with a huge vision and an ecosystem that is gigantic!”

The fact that no two pregnancies are the same is something that Engelhardt is keen to address with the app. “We wanted to offer women something that would accompany them through the nine months, but that was also tailored to individual needs.” To that end, the app’s workouts and nutritional advice are adapted to the specific needs of pregnant women.

In an effort to cooperate with key partners, Engelhardt exchanged experiences with the German Midwives Association, which led to some interesting feedback. “Some midwives worried that we would take their job away from them,” Engelhardt says, while making it clear that “this is not at all our intention. We can’t be without midwives, we need them!”

The cooperation with the German Midwives Association resulted in Ammely, a website that connects parents with midwives through online sessions. “Here we try to compensate for the over- and undersupply of midwives,” Engelhardt says.

This has been a good starting point in exploring the many ways in which Keleya could potentially expand. “We want to unite midwives, gynaecologists, birth clinics and paediatricians in the app at some point in the future,” Engelhardt says, a goal that could have myriad benefits for pregnancies, such as enabling the early detection of certain diseases in mothers and babies.

Having evolved from the desire to support a friend into a desire to support pregnant women more widely, Engelhardt’s Keleya is proving itself to be a powerful ally to women during their pregnancies.

keleya: Pregnancy App & Yoga

Fitness, Baby + Tracker

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