Ryan Breslow, the brash founder and former CEO of Bolt, told TechCrunch in 2022 that he was exit payment company with one click to start a new company in the health and wellness sector called Love. Well, today is not only World Love Day, but the launch of Love.
Love previously raised $7.5 million from investors, including Human Capital and MaC Venture Capital, last year. Breslow told TechCrunch that the company has since raised another tranche (to bring the total funding to just under $20 million) from a group of new and existing investors that had previously backed Bolt, including MaC Venture Capital, Streamlined Ventures and Activant. Fundraising is ongoing, Breslow said.
Breslow told his colleague Connie Loizos nine months ago that Love would be a “people-powered pharmacy” with a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) infrastructure “where members, who buy ‘love tokens’ with Ethereum or another reserve currency “You can discuss homeopathy and other pharmaceutical alternatives, then vote on which one should be tested in clinical trials. Then the DAO will fund the studies.”
Instead, Love launches first as a wellness marketplace featuring an initially curated 200 products such as supplements, health test kits, and essential oils, among categories including stress reduction and gut health. Love will earn a commission on sales.
Discussing that little twist, Breslow said that he and his founding team, which includes former Bolt colleague Karissa Paddie, director of product and innovation, thought about starting with a form of open collaboration to test tokens and generate data on wellness products. “But we realized there were a few steps to take before that.” Additionally, it is important to note that Breslow’s stake in another DAO is now the subject of legal issues, Forbes reported in March.
“There is a lot that could be done,” Breslow said. “There is no aggregator, there is no marketplace in the space, so there is no basic vetting. We had to do all of these things, including building consumer interest, building a consumer database, and collecting data on the products that consumers are most interested in and then leveraging that in the future to pursue crypto ambitions. previous”.
All products on the site pass a set of review and compliance processes developed in partnership with the clinical trial company Radicle Science. For each item, there will also be two scores: a love score and a consumer score.
There will also be online and offline communities to connect people on “healing journeys”, for example around mental health, and a library of digital content with wellness videos.
Now that the site is live, Love can move forward with expansion plans. It has 700 vetted and tested ready-to-use products. New products and categories will be added in stages and will also be accompanied by educational content, Breslow said. Future iterations of the site will include social commerce.
“I’m really expanding on what a review means and what a testimonial means,” Breslow said. “We will reward users with points for participating and informing the community about how the product works for them. We’re also integrating elements of social commerce that are actually quite prevalent in Asia. We are inspired by that and believe that social commerce can have a big role to play in wellbeing.”
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