Mizzen+Main founder Kevin Lavelle is looking to reshape the baby monitor industry and has snagged a $3.7 million investment for his new Dallas-based company.
Lavelle, a Southern Methodist University alum, founded Dallas-based men’s apparel brand Mizzen+Main in 2012 and left his role as CEO in 2019 to focus on activism with Stand Together. Now, he’s returning to entrepreneurship.
“This idea has been with me since my son was a couple months old,” said Lavelle. “It has really bothered me that no one has fixed this problem.”
Lavelle said he came up with the product after losing connection to an industry-leading baby camera used by his family.
His and co-founder Charlie Hill’s latest venture, Harbor, will address this and other issues common to the baby monitor market through a camera that streams with or without internet access in 2K quality and end-to-end encryption for data security.
Other features include a split-screen function allowing parents to monitor up to four children at once and a parent alert system Harbor is calling “Smart Audio.”
A waitlist for Harbor’s baby monitors has already released. The first hundred units will ship in spring and the rest later this year.
The baby monitors are priced as a two-year membership at $28 per month, including the camera, monitor tablet and associated features. Harbor does not currently plan on distributing through retailers, but will sell the baby monitors on their website, said Lavelle.
In addition to the monitor, Harbor will offer a new subscription service called ‘Remote Night Nannying.’
The company is partnering with pediatric sleep experts to monitor children remotely and inform parents of what they should do when their kids wake up or cry in the middle of the night. The service will be an optional add-on to the monitors themselves.
“The idea fundamentally there is to democratize access to sleep training and expertise,” said Lavelle. “Instead of $400 per night in a city like Dallas for somebody to come into your house from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., you can hire us for a fraction of that price. It will end up being 5 to 10% of that.”
Harbor currently offers digital counseling services on their website, connecting young parents with pediatric care experts for non-medical advice for a $9 per month subscription.
“Anything we can do to make it easier to have kids is a great thing to do,” said Lavelle. “One of the most difficult aspects of having kids is the sleep deprivation and uncertainty and exhaustion that comes in that first year, and we can make a substantial dent in that in a way that has never been possible before.”
Trust Ventures, an investment firm in Austin, led the seed round, following an early investment by the fund in September 2022. Dallas-based investment firms Morrison Seger and Capital Factory also participated in this round of funding.
