Roswell startup, Talli, has closed a $220k pre-seed funding round led by Atlanta’s Outlander Labs. Recently established in Atlanta after a move from California, Outlander’s founding team, Leura and Paige Craig, are bringing their vast experience and network to early stage founders in the Southeast. And their first two investments are in female-led consumer technology companies. Outlander founder Leura Craig cited Talli’s “exceptional founders with big visions, talent, and the fortitude to get things done” as the reason Outlander chose Talli as one of the fund’s inaugural investments.
Founded by mother of two and career-long UX/product manager Lauren Longo, Talli’s mission is to reduce the mental burden of caregiving. They do this by providing a variety of options for easy logging and analytics of care and health data.
The idea for the Talli platform came when Lauren was struggling to keep up as a working mom with an infant. She had a weeks-old baby who wasn’t eating or sleeping, and the whole family was sleep deprived and stressed. Longo and her husband were working with their pediatrician and lactation consultant to get things on track, but they were struggling to get a handle on the information they were asked for at each visit. They’d tried various apps, but were frustrated by the multiple steps each one took to log events. With backgrounds in user experience, software development, and hardware development, Longo and her husband, John, built a simple device with buttons for the activities they were tracking, and a bare bones app that it logged to for reporting, analytics, and editing. The quick, one-touch device reduced friction at each event, adding up to a significant time savings over the course of a day. It was fast and easy for tired parents, and intuitive for grandparents, nannies, and other caregivers.
After beta testing with families across the US in 2018, Lauren and John brought on long-time colleague Patrick Caldwell to help drive the production-ready version of the platform. As they built out the device and app, as well as an Alexa skill for hands-free logging, the team decided early on to make the whole platform content agnostic. Longo says, “From our earliest days, I don’t think we’ve had a single conversation that didn’t end with the other person saying something like, ‘Yes, this is a big help for tired parents. And you know how else I could use this…?’ We hear most frequently from those caring for aging loved ones. But we’ve also heard from those managing diagnosis or care for chronic conditions and parents of older children with special medical needs. The platform we’ve built is flexible enough to support all of them, and we have plans to do that in the near future.”
The Talli team proved out the flexibility of their platform in March of 2020, when they reconfigured their app to become a symptom tracker for COVID-19 in just three weeks. The team has plans in the works for several additional iterations of Talli across care tech verticals.
Talli was selected in September of 2020 as a showcase company at this year’s Venture Atlanta Conference as one of the Southeast’s most promising technology companies. This year’s conference will take place virtually on October 21-22. Having just launched their Talli Baby product in August, the Talli team is thrilled with the timing of this opportunity. Longo says, “As we look to grow our impact in the baby tech space and expand to additional markets across care tech more generally (senior care, chronic conditions, etc,), Venture Atlanta gives us a forum for connecting with key investors and business leaders who know and care about this space.”
To learn more about Talli, visit talli.me. Outlander Labs is online at outlanderlabs.com. For additional information about Venture Atlanta, to register for the event or to view the conference schedule, please visit www.ventureatlanta.org.
About Talli
Founded by a husband-wife team in Atlanta, Talli’s mission is to reduce the mental burden of caregiving through easier logging and analytics of care and health data. Their first product, Talli Baby, is available for pre-order now.