February the 22nd, 2022 - The wildly successful Bellabeat company is opening some new offices across several new countries as even more expansion is being eyed.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Lucija Spiljak writes, the Bellabeat company, a leading wellness company that produces smart women’s jewellery, currently employs about 200 people in offices located all around the world. They're also busy with planning further expansion, and have opened new offices in Singapore, Lisbon, Copenhagen and Brazil to hire sales, engineering and design professionals. Their team was joined by Edwin Veenman and Daniel Lorenz.

The Bellabeat company has been around since back in 2014 and recently opened its first physical store in the French capital of Paris, followed by Amsterdam and Berlin. As was confirmed earlier, Zagreb can also expect physical trade soon. So far, they have sold millions of their various devices, whose innovative functions and application, but also the aesthetic appeal, has gained a leading status in the so-called niche market of wellness technologies for women.

Bellabeat operates through two Croatian subsidiaries, and as they explained, due to their large number of employees and thinking about their productivity, a corporate wellness platform was created.

"Employees aren't necessarily productive just because they're physically present at work, so we came up with that platform with our smart jewellery and our entire wellness platform, and it's intended specifically for women in corporations. With a holistic approach based on real data, the Bellabeat corporate wellness programme aims to improve the psychophysical health of women and as such boost their productivity at work,'' explained co-founder Urska Srsen.

They emphasised how they build and base their team on young people who are looking for and seeing their lifestyle in business, all while being present, engaged and productive.

“We're expanding our teams that can be at the service of clients in local areas, as we're expanding our business model not only to the end customer but also to B2B corporate clients who want to offer their employees our services for better wellness, as well as various organisations and companies testing out various therapies, types of training and even drugs,'' said Bellabeat's co-founder Sandro Mur.

Only 20 percent of the Bellabeat company's employees actually come into the office, while everyone else is recommended to work from home. According to the company, with this approach, they want to create a new sort of work culture in which employees are encouraged to primarily deal with their health so that they can then dedicate themselves to their careers properly.

It's worth noting that the company recently signed a contract with Bank of America, the third largest investment bank in the entire world. The investment closes the largest round of recapitalisation so far. The obtained fresh capital is being invested in development and growth, after which they'll achieve a higher market valuation. So far, they have raised a total of 100 million US dollars in capital investment from 28 investors.

Bellabeat has eight million users from all over the world on its platform, and they claim that the company's revenues are growing by 20 percent on a monthly basis. As co-founder Urska Srsen pointed out earlier, their main mission is to empower and make women aware that innovative technology and the analysis of health data are used to detect and improve life habits.

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June the 16th, 2021 - The Zagreb company Bellabeat, a Croatian startup which has gained traction and a lot of attention as time has gone on, has presented its brand new smart bracelet.

As Novac/Bernard Ivezic writes, Bellabeat initially started producing smart bracelets seven years ago, of which, according to Business Insider, Leaf Urban and Leaf Chakra were named the best pieces of smart jewellery in the entire world back in February. The company has since completed the development of a new smart bracelet named Ivy. There are more than 50,000 pre-orders for it already, and this also means that the Zagreb company Bellabeat has more than 50,000 new subscribers.

Namely, with the creation of this new smart bracelet, the Zagreb company Bellabeat is changing its business model, and now its bracelets include a monthly subscription.

Sandro Mur, the co-founder and CEO of the Zagreb company Bellabeat, explained that Ivy better monitors heart and respiratory health, enabling the company to provide its customers with better quality information not only about their physical health but also their mental health, which is often forgotten about but is just as important.

Twenty long months of development...

''We're very proud of the new Bellabeat product, which we've been designing and perfecting for more than 20 months to come to a solution that is perfectly aligned with all the needs of women today,'' says Mur.

He explains that Ivy measures calories, distances, active pulse, exercise intensity during the day and monitors meditation, and at night it monitors sleep duration, sleep quality, resting heart rate, respiration and heart coherence. Based on the above and additional data collected through the app, Mur states that they offer a range of indicators on body readiness, wellness and even menstrual cycle.

''Ivy has advanced sensors to measure steps and active time spent, as well as all other parameters it monitors, and the design, which is aimed at women, offers them the chance to monitor their body dynamics throughout the day to allow them to better understand their own body and individual needs better than any other similar product on the market,'' says Mur.

In saying that, he is primarily thinking of the loudest competitor in the segment of smart items - Apple. The Zagreb company Bellabeat, for example, claims that its smart device can estimate when the user should give up on doing their next exercise due to exhaustion and a risk of becoming unwell. This assessment is made by advanced algorithms developed by the Croatian startup itself, and are trained on what is probably the largest private health database in Croatia.

The company states that it has more than 100 billion sets of health data about its users. This is an extremely important piece of information because the more data a algorithm can be trained on, the more accurate it is. It isn't known how much Bellabeat smart jewellery has been sold to date, but the latest known data from 2017 indicates that it had then sold more than 700,000 pieces. This is a record that has not been surpassed by any other Croatian startup.

Mur, who recently announced he was raising a 10 million US dollar investment, is considering one acquisition and plans to go public within three years and sees an opportunity to open up the corporate wellness market with a new product.

''I think that we've become much more aware of our own health and the health of the people we work and are around, and that more and more employers and managers understand the importance of caring for employee health,'' says Mur.

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February 8, 2021 – In a recent test of smart jewelry available on the market, conducted by Business Insider, the Croatian Bellabeat Leaf Urban pendant was named the best smart jewelry, and Bellabeat's Leaf Chakra the best smart bracelet in the world.

As Jutarnji list reports, smart jewelry from one of the first and most successful Croatian startups, the company Bellabeat, was rated the best in the world in the Business Insider survey. They rated Bellabeat’s Leaf Urban pendant as the best smart jewelry in the world, as well as Bellabeat's Leaf Chakra as the best smart bracelet in the world.

The startup of Croatian mathematician Sandro Mur and Slovenian artist Urška Sršen, which became a subsidiary of Five River Group, has been breaking into the market again for the last three years and is succeeding.

Fitness tracker as a work of art

In recent years, Bellabeat has been written about mostly in the context of downsizing and business problems. However, three years ago, they got a new investment, as much as 14 million dollars, started attracting new staff, and now they have received the first major confirmation of their progress in product development.

So far, they have sold two million of their products, and their main market is the US.

Bellabeat states that Leaf Urban, also their best-selling product, is a perfect blend of technology and modern design. They have shown that smart jewelry does not have to be ugly or super masculine to be highly technically useful.

"This piece of smart jewelry in the shape of a leaf turns a fitness tracker into a work of art. It can be worn as a bracelet, necklace or brooch, does not disturb the user with an additional screen, its battery lasts up to 6 months and can monitor your activity, stress level, hydration, menstrual cycle, meditation, and sleep. It connects wirelessly to a mobile app," they point out.

Eight million people use their app

All ideas for Bellabeat's products came from their creative director Urška Sršen. In a recent interview for Jutarnji list, she said that she has been battling autoimmune diseases since she was a child and that she has learned to control them by managing her lifestyle with enough exercise, proper nutrition, enough sleep, and stress reduction.

“I realized that technology can be a great tool that can help raise awareness of your own lifestyle and hone healthy habits. That's how Bellabeat came to be. Most of the tools that were on the market until then were not so much adapted to women, i.e., users who are not so much focused exclusively on fitness, but on their lifestyle in general," said Sršen, who once ended up on Forbes' prestigious "30 under 30" list.

Bellabeat Leaf Urban

The smart water bottle Spring, which enables automatic hydration monitoring, is also in their offer, as well as the Time smartwatch and the new Ivy collection, similar to Leaf, which has additional functions for measuring heart rate and cardio coherence.

In addition to hardware, Bellabeat is increasingly working on its software, which is used by about eight million people. Their app offers more and more personalized content, such as tips related to women’s health and beauty, diet recipes, training plan, guided meditations etc.

Testing and collecting data

This Croatian startup has developed an algorithm that can predict stress resistance on any given day. They claim that if you say that you did not sleep well or that you did not exercise, the algorithm itself will predict that you may be more susceptible to stress that day.

Bellabeat's young team develops this content in collaboration with top wellness instructors. Also, when developing all their products and contents, they consult with medical experts and they test and verify everything.

"I think that in the future, technology will be an increasing factor and contributor to the wellness industry's progress. We want to be a ‘data company’. Technology is our tool, but data is our greatest treasure. Based on that, we can further improve our services, but also work on the development of the wellness market in general," concludes Sršen.

To read more about lifestyle in Croatia, follow TCN's dedicated page.

December the 3rd, 2020 - The Croatian Bellabeat, which currently holds an enviably strong position on the market as a data company and has overcome many an obstacle since its founding, has seen a very well known economist from Scandinavia join its already impressive ranks.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, the Croatian Bellabeat is continuing to raise the business it engages in to an even higher level by having economist Jeppe Christiansen join its team. The economist is otherwise world-renowned expert in investment and business circles.

Thw world-renowned Scandinavian economist is also a professor at the University of Copenhagen and a director at the Lego Group, the world's largest toy manufacturer. On top of all of that, he is also vice president of Novo Nordisk, a multinational pharmaceutical company with manufacturing facilities and offices across thirteen countries and annual revenue of 19.2 billion US dollars.

Jeppe will focus on positioning he Croatian Bellabeat as a data firm and help them make key collaborations with the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, where they see huge potential for Bellabeat because of the data it has.

The Croatian Bellabeat was otherwise among the very first to recognise the great global leap of the women’s wellness industry. Over the past four years, they have developed an original approach in the wellness sector and introduced personalised wellness programmes based on the menstrual cycles of women. The Croatian Bellabeat uses about 50,000 new data sets for each person, and by putting highly individual data at the very centre of the algorithm, Bellabeat provides each woman with the optimal way to achieve her goals including a weight loss programme, maintaining her desired weight, achieving pregnancy, optimising sleep, and much more.

With his economic knowledge and world-renowned investment experience, Jeppe Christiansen will make a significant contribution to Bellabeat over the next phase of this successful Croatian company's expansion and the desired conquest of the demanding and challenging wellness market.

''Bellabeat has a very strong position in the market as a data company, given that old industries such as pharmaceuticals have very serious problems in the wellness sector, as well as innovations in that same sector, and if they go in this direction, Bellabeat has a great chance to establish itself as a leading data company on the global wellness market,'' stated Jeppe Christiansen.

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This Croatian startup's beginnings come from Zagreb and it first became well known back in 2014 as the first startup attract a large investment from outside of the Republic of Croatia.

As Bernard Ivezic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 12th of April, 2019, the Croatian startup Bellabeat received an investment from AOL Ventures in the amount of 14.2 million dollars, the equivalent of 12.5 million euros. It's not the biggest investment to be received by a Croatian startup last year, as that remains marked by Porsche's entrance into the co-ownership of Rimac Automobila for 18.7 millions euros, but it remains the second largest. Bellabeat has so far kept this massive investment secret.

AOL is one of the three largest Internet service providers in the United States of America. The company is part of the large Verizon group, which owns a number of popular media outlets including The Huffington Post, Engadget, TechCrunch, and MapQuest. In the group is also the former Yahoo and the AOL Desktop software solution.

Croatia's Bellabeat underwent restructuring half a year before the investment took place, at the end of 2017 and in early 2018. The company then let a number of its employees go. Sandro Mur, co-founder and director of Bellabeat, subsequently announced that he currently has a total of fifty employees and plans to increase this number to seventy. At that time, the Croatian company's focus was on establishing an office across the Atlantic over in New York. The company has developed a range of high-tech products for women, from jewellery to smart water bottles, and plans to deal with artificial intelligence in the health preservation sector.

Five years ago, the founders of Bellabeat, Sandro Mur and Urška Sršen, set the bar very high for Croatian startups. They received a record 4.5 million dollar investment from a number of well-known investors. Among them were actress Jessica Alba, the creator and leading developer of Google Earth, Paul Buchheit, the founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, one of the hundred richest people, Nicolas Berggruen, and one of the most famous investors in the Silicon Valley and one of the very first to have invested in Google and PayPal, Ron Conway.

Make sure to follow our dedicated Made in Croatia and business pages for much more on startups and companies from Croatia, as well as the overall business and investment climate in Croatia.

Click here for the original article by Bernard Ivezic for Poslovni Dnevnik

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