Every waist tells a story
Meet the world’s first waist-worn wearable device
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Startup: Bèbèdí
Location: United Kingdom (Incorporated in the US)
Ask: $1 million pre-seed
Demo Video
There’s a wearable whose form predates the Apple Watch, the Oura Ring, and every fitness tracker the tech world has ever shipped. It’s waist beads.
Across West Africa, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora, women have worn waist beads for centuries as markers of womanhood, as rites of passage, and as a way of reading their own bodies.
When a strand sits tight, something has changed. When it rides freely, something else has. This intuitive feedback has years of cultural knowledge behind it. But there’s scientific evidence backing it up too.
Waist circumference is a stronger predictor of Type 2 diabetes in women than BMI, and a key indicator of heart disease. It’s an indicator for hormonal changes that happen in women over the course of the month. And it’s a leading indicator of PCOS, a condition that affects 10-13% of women. Important as it is, this data point is never tracked medically. But it’s not the only female health marker that’s often overlooked.
Most health baselines used for diagnosis today were based on men. Another study found that trials for 60% of FDA-approved drugs didn’t involve a sufficient number of women. It wasn’t until 1993 that the NIH mandated women’s inclusion in clinical trials. And disaggregated female data only began appearing in research around 2018.
The wellness devices dominating shelves today, smartwatches, fitness rings, continuous glucose monitors, came from this version of the world where women were treated like smaller men.
Last week, Next Capital spoke to Tosin Oyegoke and Omotayo Olaiya, two founders who’d spent the last seven years designing and shipping waist beads to thousands of women across 50 countries worldwide.
Now, they’re building a new kind of company. It’s called Bèbèdí, a yoruba word that means “waist”. Bèbèdí is…
A waist-worn wearable that learns your body over time
Bèbèdí is a waist-worn wellness wearable designed exclusively for women.
It correlates changes in waist circumference gotten from proprietary sensors with other physiological data like heart rate, movement, stress markers, sleep, and temperature, to help women understand their bodies everyday through pattern recognition and personalized insights.
The product suite is made of two things: (1) the wearable, which does the sensing (2) the companion app, which uses AI to provide insights on the metrics.
Women can start with Bèbèdí from day one. The wearable and companion app build a personal baseline over time. For those who already use other wearables, they can also import historical data to enrich context, but it’s not required.
What makes the difference is the form factor. Most wearables go on your wrist, arm, or a finger. But Bèbèdí sits on the waist. The waist is not a new form factor for women. It is, arguably, the most culturally resonant one.
Bèbèdí’s insight is that a wearable rooted in a tradition that already carries meaning, will generate richer longitudinal data than one abandoned in a drawer. The AI model improves the longer it’s worn: learning baselines, detecting deviations, and personalizing insights over time.
Money talk
Bèbèdí makes money through three channels: (1) Hardware sales, with each wearable going for at least $400. (2) A subscription for the companion app at $6 a month (3) Custom accessories to change the look and feel of the wearable.
Bèbèdí is running ongoing private beta with early users wearing them through everyday life to improve comfort, fit, and data consistency. It also has a growing waitlist of 1000+ people ahead of a Q2 2026 preorder launch.
The company has two provisional patents and will be applying for a few more later this year. It’s also raised up to $50,000 in a family and friends’ round and is raising a bigger round to support its full rollout.
The Big Picture
Wearables are one of the fastest-growing categories in consumer tech. In 2025 alone, Oura, a European wearable company, sold 3 million units of its smart ring product. That’s more than its total sales since 2015 when it was founded.
The global wearable technology market will grow from $84.53 billion in 2025 to $176 billion by 2030. Bèbèdí enters this wave with something none of the incumbents have: a new form factor. Where Oura, Whoop, and Apple Watch compete on the wrist and finger, Bèbèdí sits on the waist, a discreet location that increases the likelihood of consistent wear and takes a form that’s culturally familiar for millions of women.
From a bottom-up perspective, the opportunity is massive. There are nearly 2 billion women worldwide aged 15-49, whom Bèbèdí could potentially serve. At a $400-per-year offering (hardware + subs) and a market capture of just 5%, that’s a $36 billion revenue opportunity.
Competition exists, and it’s well-funded. Oura is an $11 billion company. Apple and Whoop have enormous distribution and brand loyalty. But none of them are built around the female hormonal cycle, none use waist circumference as a biometric signal, and none are designed exclusively for women. Bèbèdí doesn’t need to beat them. It only needs to build the category they’re not in and gain advantage.
If it does, the compounding effects are real. Every woman who wears the device contributes to a waist-circumference biometric dataset that has never existed before. Over time, that dataset will become the largest longitudinal repository of women-specific health data in the world, one that could unlock value through clinical research partnerships, pharmaceutical collaborations, and diagnostic insights that no other company is currently positioned to offer.
In a category where trust is the product, being first to build a women-only, culture-rooted health dataset could be the most durable moat in femtech.
Do you think Bèbèdí is well-positioned to become the defining women’s health wearable?
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Love this! Just got back from visiting Senegal and have some waist beads. I’ve been wearing WHOOP for 3 years this would be a great alternative.