Julie Wainwright is back with a new, venture-backed startup
Reading Time: 2 minutesJulie Wainwright, founder and former CEO of the publicly traded, luxury online consignment company The RealReal, is back with a new startup.
Called Ahara, the Los Angeles-based outfit describes itself as a personalized nutrition company that provides recommendations to its customers after they first fill out a health questionnaire that asks them about their diet and health history, and their age and location, after which they can take a variety of at-home tests for genetic, epigenetic and biomarkers.
According to Ahara, for example, its tests can tell the company how effectively someone is metabolizing specific nutrients; how healthy his or her cells are; and which tests an individual’s blood levels for key nutrients like vitamin D and Omega 3s.
Wainwright isn’t a wellness expert, but after leaving The RealReal last June after running the company for 11 years, she teamed up with celebrity physician-nutritionist Melina Jampolis as co-founder. Jampolis is also the outfit’s chief medical doctor. Indeed, in a quiet press release published yesterday, the duo — who already feature half a dozen other employees on their site — including a performance marketer — say they have themselves contributed to a $10.25 million round that was led by Greycroft, with participation from Headline, SHAKTI and entrepreneur Sandy Sholl.
Ahara is currently in beta and, according to its own literature, will operate a freemium model that provides special benefits to ‘premium’ members.
That the operation appears to require far fewer resources than The RealReal isn’t surprising. Wainwright — who earlier led the dot.com-era company Pets.com — is coming off of a business that’s beloved by its customers but highly challenging from a margins perspective.
In conversation last week with investor Ian Sigalow of Greycroft — the firm was also an early backer in The RealReal — he offered his theories about why The RealReal boasts a market cap of just $170 million after reaching a market cap of $2.39 billion the day of its IPO three years ago.
Though The RealReal was a ‘really good idea,’ creating a far more vibrant second-hand luxury goods market, the ‘challenge with the model is that it is very capital intensive. The storage of the garments is expensive. The way that they procure in such a white-glove manner is expensive.’ Wainwright ‘executed really well on the vision, but driving a profitable machine and taking the cost out of it is just very hard to deal with in that business because it’s all basically one-off unique pieces of fashion product, and they all have to be graded. It’s a complicated business to scale.’
Ahara joins a growing spate of digital nutrition startups. Though each has a slightly different flavor, over the last six months, Mighty Health, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup offering a daily health program designed for adults ages 50 and up, raised $7.6 million in venture backing; Nourish, a San Francisco-based telehealth platform for nutrition, raised $8 million in seed funding; and Zoe, a British nutrition and health tracking app, also attracted the attention of VCs, raising £25 million from investors, to name just a few.
Ref: techcrunch
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG