Roshni Mahtani Cheung: Mother of One, Mother to All

In a continuation of our International Women’s Day 2022, and part of our monthly Vertex Female Founder Series, we are sharing beautiful, untold stories of our female founders overcoming the odds and obstacles to build businesses that are disruptive, yet transformative to the lives of many. Today we are proud to feature Roshni Mahtani Cheung.

At home, Roshni Mahtani Cheung is a mom of one (to her adorable six-year-old daughter, Shan), and in the workplace, she is the de facto mom of moms as the founder and CEO of The ParentInc — a mediatech company focused on parenting and pregnancies. It recently completed its series D round in April 2022, successfully raising $22 million for business expansion plans. However, it would hardly be an overstatement to call her a “mother to all,” with the multiple roles she juggles on top of running her company — from being a mentor to founders, board member of a non-profit, to being an executive director of a documentary.

Curious about her journey in founding a parenting company that currently boasts more than 35 million monthly users, and her dedication to helping both mothers and female founders make the best decisions for their personal and professional growth, I’m grateful for the opportunity to interview her to find out more.

Early Career: Ambitions for Entrepreneurship and Love for Journalism

“Being a doctor, or lawyer is the usual ambition of my peers. But not for me, being an entrepreneur has always been my lifelong ambition, which I know is uncommon,” shares Roshni.

As her uncles fondly recall, Roshni’s first stab at entrepreneurship began when she was 12, where she resold “…bottles of whiskey [bought from] the duty-free store ?at the airport to [her] uncles at a profit!” In fact, her first exposure to the world of business began at age nine, when she made her first trade on the stock market!

While she was studying Communications and Marketing at university, she had to dabble in odd jobs such as telemarketing and door to door surveys to offset some of the financial burden on her family, who were hit hard by the global financial crisis. It was coincidentally one of her jobs — as a script writer at a TV production house — that reaffirmed her passion for journalism. This testing period of juggling studies with work not only confirmed her love for journalism and media, but according to her, also led her to “learn the value of hardwork… [and] upped my adversity quotient.”

The Birth of The ParentInc

While entrepreneurship was in her blood and journalism may be her formal training, her interest/passion for parenting wasn’t developed until after her graduation, when Roshni worked as a part-time babysitter in New York, USA, at the age of 25.

In a way, the genesis of The ParentInc came from one simple question:

“Can babies eat durian?”

This million dollar and innocuous question was posted to Roshni by an adorable three-year-old girl she was babysitting then. In her babysitting capacity, she also observed that the dominant ways of parenting in America contrasted heavily with her own experience growing up in an Asian household, having been born and raised in Singapore. It dawned on her that “there was a need for a parenting blog–since there was basically no online parenting content in Asia.”

With this, she was inspired to start a parenting company that served as a cultural aggregator of sorts, making the best parenting practices across cultures easily accessible to parents on their platform. The rest was history.

Since its founding, the Parentinc’s online platforms have grown to over 35 million users monthly, and is also available in 13 languages across 11 countries. Their platforms facilitate connections between Asian parents who face similar parenting problems, and even offer translations of parenting studies from developed regions such as Europe, to aid parents in their operating regions to arrive at the best decisions for their children.

The Influence of Motherhood

There is a common saying, “Your life forever changes when you first become a mother.”

Roshni recognises that her life experiences have made her “tough and hardy” as a person, but nothing would have prepared her sufficiently for parenthood. The birth of her daughter was the other turning point in her life. “Motherhood is so tough,” she admitted. And this new experience of motherhood influenced her business philosophy.

Motherhood has enabled Roshni to empathize greatly with how parents want limited intervention in their own parenting ways, but yet eager to find out how others are raising their kids to aid their decision-making process. In essence, being a mother enabled Roshni to?“…become truly compassionate about our community and give constructive feedback towards our own products from a consumer perspective. I gained real consumer insights instead of relying on secondary research, which improved our business and the way we catered to the community.”?This has helped refine the “non-judgmental approach to parenting” that underpins The ParentInc’s web and app platforms, which provide safe spaces for parents to access parenting information and discuss parenting woes or queries.

Roshni felt blessed that her pregnancy had been a smooth one, but at one of their user behaviour analysis meetings, she stumbled upon the biggest distraught that all parents and prospective parents face — that of stillbirths. This was a key motivation for the launch of?Project Sidekicks?in July 2020. As The Parentinc’s primary CSR initiative,?Project Sidekicks aims to reduce stillbirths in the region by 10%. The application developed in support of this initiative reduces the risks of stillbirths by raising awareness on the benefits of sleeping on the side, counting baby’s kicks, and giving up smoking for those pregnant. The application also provides emotional and physical recovery guidance in the unfortunate event of pregnancy loss, through a “healing mode” that was developed in consultation with medical experts. Her goals for Project Sidekicks are to help?100 million families in Southeast Asia have healthy pregnancies and to reduce stillbirth rates in the region by 10 percent in the next three years. “Every life is precious; each one lost is one too many.”

On Company Culture and Building her Team

The ParentInc is founded on three core virtues:?Integrity, Curiosity, and Ownership. Roshni acknowledges the critical importance of these core virtues in the success of their business:

“The ParentInc’s past and future success as a company, as well as the trust we have earned from our community, partners, and supporters, are all grounded in our unyielding commitment to upholding these three core virtues — with integrity as the foundation that underpins all.”

In building her team, Roshni looks for talents who are a good fit with the company’s core virtues, and who are also humble, daring, and willing to go the extra mile in doing what needs to be done.

With such a close-knit team and employee alignment with company culture, it was perhaps little wonder that Roshni’s team in Manila surprised her with a baby shower prior to her official pregnancy reveal. Till today, Roshni treasures it as one of the most touching moments of her time at The ParentInc, which reminded her of not only the need to?“keep going, and why our community of mothers needed our platform — because it offered support in the various ways they needed it,”?but also?nurturing a team?that has?“compassion and saw the significance of our company’s mission and supported it wholeheartedly.”

Mother to All: Boundless Capacity to Nurture

Besides running The ParentInc, Roshni is also an active mentor, advisor, and even an executive producer for a documentary.

Co-founding the Female Founders Network with Meri Rosich a few years back, Roshni aims to address the gender gap and improve the proportion of women in tech enabled startups and female board representation. The network has a collective membership of 2,000 female founders to date, unified by the common goal of knowledge exchange and female empowerment. Roshni shares:

“During the pandemic, [Female Founders Network] brought 50 top women leaders together to have small dinners at each other’s home every quarter. The tradition has continued two years on, and we just hosted our 10th dinner!”

Roshni is also the executive producer of?Untouchable: Children of God,?which premiered in late 2013. The film documents the callous abuse of young girls in the brothels of India, who were initially drugged, trafficked, and sold from neighboring Nepal. As an executive producer, Roshni leveraged her business skills to aid in fundraising, as well as the financial, operations and marketing aspects of the production process. In her own words, “…producing such a great documentary echoes with my mission of empowering women.”

The drive behind juggling so many responsibilities is simple, as Roshni sees it as her personal mission in life to?“ empower women and mothers with the skills, knowledge and guidance, which will enable them to progress, move forward, and build a sustainable business by themselves.”

Partnership with VVSEAI

Having led The ParentInc’s series A round back in January 2015, VVSEAI has collaborated and worked with The ParentInc for a long time as one of their earliest investors.

Roshni shares that?“Joo Hock (Managing Partner) and Carmen (Partner) always give great advice and constructive guidance in each board meeting”.

In fact, the relationship that Roshni and Carmen share is akin to that of a familial bond. One fond memory Roshni has of the partnership with VVSEAI was how selflessly Carmen and her family supported The ParentInc to weather the challenges posed by the pandemic:

“ At the height of the pandemic when quarantines were being imposed all over the world and schools were closed, I couldn’t be more grateful to Carmen for truly embodying the saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Her daughters became virtual babysitters and tutors for our employees who had young kids, so they could focus on tasks or simply take a break from the ordeal of having to juggle caring for the kids while working. It was a very heartwarming gesture that helped us survive the pandemic.”

Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India (VVSEAI) is excited for The ParentInc’s next chapter of growth, as they foray into a subscription based model for their apps and platforms that will be supplemented with new babycare trackers, whilst also growing their direct-to-consumer (D2C) commerce brand, Mama’s Choice.

P.S. If you’re still wondering whether babies can eat Durian, the answer is yes! (But in very small quantities as it’s extremely sweet and “heaty!”)

Like this story? Please like, comment and share. And read our other stories of our portfolio female founders?here .