At Jefferies’ 2024 Private Internet Conference, “In the Age of AI,” founders, investors, and financial leaders gathered to discuss a period of record transformation for the consumer internet sector.
Jefferies Insights had the chance to connect with Anushka Salinas, Chief Executive Officer of Nanit and former President and Chief Operating Officer of Rent the Runway.
Nanit, a parenting tech company, offers smart baby monitors that track movement, sleep, breathing, and more. Blending computer vision, machine learning, and sleep science, Nanit’s products are now the top-grossing smart baby monitors in the United States.
Jefferies’ conversation with Salinas was timely. Consumer tech companies are rapidly adopting AI across their products, operations, and go-to-market strategies. Though AI’s potential is immense, questions remain. Many are skeptical of its immediate benefits, for both consumers and enterprises.
Nanit, founded nine years ago, stands out as a rare company for which AI is alreadya critical part of its success. Its products showcase AI’s potential to prove its worth beyond the current hype.
In this conversation, Salinas shared how AI helped fuel Nanit’s product suite and market leadership. Her insights offer a roadmap for founders, advisors, and investors as they search for practical ways to harness AI for growth.
The following Q&A was lightly edited for clarity and length.
Nanit is the most used app on my phone – and that’s true for so many young parents. Tell us more about Nanit and your journey to the company.
Nanit is a parenting tech company, founded nine years ago by two computer vision engineers. Two dads who wanted to hack baby sleep. They built an innovative product, and today, we’re the number one smart baby monitor in the US.
I spent the majority of my career in retail fashion, a category that thinks deeply about harnessing data to deliver better customer and business outcomes. Joining Nanit, I’ve been amazed by the way we use data. We’ve built an AI algorithm on billions of hours of tracked sleep, and it’s incredible.
How is Nanit’s product differentiated from other smart baby monitors?
It’s completely differentiated from other products in the category. We use computer vision and a host of algorithms to provide deeper insights to parents.
These algorithms cover different pillars: sleep, developmental milestones, breathing, speech. That’s the key difference: we can provide unique insights to families, aiding them through their parenting journey.
We’ve continued to build our AI capabilities based on our data set. These incremental opportunities have proved very meaningful, as we’ve added tools like movement tracking and breathing motion monitoring. Today, we’re still the only company that offers breathing monitoring without any wearable for the child. We’re bringing our customers more and more innovation.
At this conference, everyone is talking about AI – how it can be applied to different businesses and verticals. How has AI become an essential part of Nanit’s products?
AI is core to what we do. It’s how the company was founded. There’s some skepticism around AI in categories like ours, but we’ve always believed it goes hand in hand with our success as a business.
At Nanit, we have a behavioral AI model that captures scenes and behaviors through computer vision. Our algorithms help us analyze a data set and provide insights to our customers: parents.
Talk about parenting as a business. Is it a healthcare business? Is it a consumer business?
That’s the million-dollar question. Today, we’re definitely a parenting business. Our products are built to support parents in their journey.
Every year, though, our product suite grows. We started with a camera, and now we have a sound light, an audio monitor, and more. Now, we’re connecting products to create predictive routines. That’s what differentiates us.
Where’s the next horizon? The capabilities, data set, and algorithms we’ve developed are extraordinarily powerful, and I believe they are applicable beyond the parenting space. That’s what we’re working through now – the next horizon of growth.
Where do you see Nanit going in three to five years?
We will have significantly more market share. When we started, no one considered paying $400 for a baby monitor, plus a subscription fee. We created the category. I think we’ll continue to see share expansion there.
Then, I expect us to expand our data set and capabilities into new markets – perhaps more on the healthcare side. We have something very powerful and proprietary to build on.
