He left a Caltech lab bench to sell meal replacement, then left meal replacement to rebuild the nicotine aisle. The throughline is the same: study the human, redesign the product.
Walk into a drugstore and the nicotine gum sits near the bandages, in clinical packaging, tasting like the inside of a battery. David Renteln looked at that shelf and saw a design failure dressed up as a medical category. Lucy, the Los Angeles company he co-founded in 2016 and runs as CEO, is his answer: tobacco-free nicotine gum and pouches engineered for flavor, texture, and speed, sold the way a modern consumer brand sells anything else.
The pitch is almost insultingly simple. Smokers know cigarettes are a bad deal. They keep buying them because the alternatives are worse to use. So Renteln did not start with a lecture. He started with the chew. "We reformulated nicotine gum and the improvements that we made were to the taste, the texture and the nicotine release speed," he has said. Cinnamon. Pomegranate. Mint. Burstable flavor capsules. The kind of detail a candy company sweats over, applied to a category that had stopped trying.
His stated goal sounds like a slogan until you notice he keeps repeating it: reduce tobacco-related harm to zero. Lucy's company line puts the number right in the mission. Renteln frames nicotine as something adults choose because they want to, and the work as giving them a cleaner way to do it. "People use nicotine because they enjoy it," he has said, a sentence that doubles as the entire product brief.
He is careful about who he is selling to. Lucy's marketing has leaned on testimonials from older former smokers rather than the glossy, youth-coded imagery that got the vape industry in trouble. "I don't want anyone underage using any nicotine product or any drug in general," Renteln told TechCrunch in 2020. It is a position that is both principled and commercially shrewd, given how the category's previous stars flamed out.
That instinct - sell to the grown-ups, skip the lifestyle gloss - is the kind of decision that only makes sense if you have watched a consumer brand grow up before. Renteln has. Twice.
"People use nicotine because they enjoy it."- David Renteln
Before he was a nicotine founder, Renteln was an evolutionary biologist with a rugby problem. At Harvard he studied human evolutionary biology and ran the rugby team as its president - a useful pairing for someone who would spend his career thinking about what bodies want and how to organize people around it. From there he headed to Caltech for a PhD in biological engineering.
He never finished. Renteln deferred the doctorate to build Soylent, the meal-replacement company that turned "I forgot to eat lunch" into a venture-scale category. As co-founder and chief marketing officer, he ran customer service, advertising, media, publicity, digital, business development, and sales - the full surface area of a direct-to-consumer brand learning to talk to people about putting something unusual in their bodies. He held the role from 2012 to 2017.
Soylent is also where the band formed. Renteln had already co-founded an education-technology startup in San Francisco with John Coogan, who became Soylent's CTO. Samy Hamdouche, a biophysics and biochemistry PhD from Caltech, ran research. When the three of them looked for the next problem, they did not pick something far afield. They picked another thing adults consume daily, that the market served badly, and that science could improve.
The leap from food to nicotine is less of a leap than it looks. Both are consumer rituals. Both reward obsessive attention to formulation, flavor, and how a product feels in the first ten seconds. Both live or die on a website and a reorder rate, not a retail shelf. Renteln had spent five years learning exactly that playbook. Lucy is him running it again, on harder mode, against an industry with a century of incumbents.
The funding followed the pattern of people who had seen the founders work before. By the 2020 Series A, Lucy had pulled together a cap table that mixed consumer specialists with contrarian bets: RRE Ventures, Vice Ventures, FundRX, plus earlier backers Y Combinator and Greycroft. Roughly $10 million to argue that the most regulated vice in America was overdue for a product redesign.
Lucy has not stayed in one lane. Alongside gum it built a pouch business, including a line called Excel pitched at tech and finance workers with knowing, tongue-in-cheek copy about "shareholder value." It is a wink at the desk-bound professional who wants a hit of focus between meetings - and a sign that Renteln reads his buyers as well as he reads his formulas.
Soylent taught Renteln a specific trick that most consumer founders never get to practice: how to convince a skeptical adult to adopt a strange new daily input, online, without a salesperson in the room. That is a rare muscle. Most direct-to-consumer companies sell a slightly nicer version of something people already buy. Soylent asked customers to replace lunch with a beige liquid on the strength of a value proposition and a tone of voice. Renteln owned that tone of voice as CMO, across advertising, publicity, customer service, and the funnel that turned curiosity into a subscription.
Carry that skill set into nicotine and the moves become obvious. Lead with the product experience, not the science lecture. Make the packaging feel like something you would leave on a desk, not hide in a medicine cabinet. Build the brand voice for the actual buyer rather than the imagined one. Price and ship it like a modern consumer subscription. None of this is exotic in 2026. It was close to heretical for a nicotine product when Renteln started, because the category had spent decades behaving like either Big Tobacco or a pharmacy, and almost never like a company that respected its customer's taste.
The flavor work is where the biology background quietly pays off. Burstable capsules, hydration, a faster release curve, options across strength - these are formulation problems, and Renteln assembled a founding team fluent in exactly that. Samy Hamdouche brought a Caltech PhD and a research background. The point was never to make nicotine novel. It was to make the experience of using it stop feeling like a punishment.
There is a discipline to how Lucy talks about all of this, and it traces straight back to its founder. Renteln does not pretend nicotine is virtuous. He frames it as a choice adults make for reasons of their own, and frames Lucy's job as removing the worst parts of how that choice gets delivered. That is a narrower and more defensible claim than the one the vaping boom made, and it is deliberately narrow. When an entire category gets in trouble for drifting toward younger users, the founder who built his brand around ex-smokers and explicit adults-only messaging is the one still standing.
It is also a posture that ages well in a press environment that loves to find the next cautionary tale. TechCrunch once asked, in a headline, whether Lucy was "the next Juul." Renteln's entire operating strategy reads like a sustained answer of no - different buyer, different message, different relationship with regulators, even if the underlying molecule is the same. He has been consistent about the line he will not cross, on the record, for years.
What makes him interesting is not that he found an underserved market. Plenty of founders do that. It is that he keeps choosing markets the culture has already made up its mind about - food you are supposed to chew, vices you are supposed to quit - and treating the conventional wisdom as a product brief rather than a wall. He is comfortable being early to an argument and waiting for the world to arrive.
A human evolutionary biology degree, the presidency of the rugby team, and a bioengineering PhD he chose not to finish. The training that taught him to start with the body, not the marketing.
Co-founder and CMO of Soylent, where he learned how to sell a strange new daily habit online and at scale - the operating manual he would reuse at Lucy.
CEO of Lucy, reformulating nicotine gum and pouches for adults and chasing a stated mission of reducing tobacco-related harm to zero.
Now a recurring voice in the conversation about nicotine and focus, appearing on biohacking podcasts and in coverage of the category's reinvention.
He captained and presided over the Harvard Rugby team. Front-row leadership, literally.
His academic background is human evolutionary biology - not business, not chemistry. He came at consumer products sideways.
He has now co-founded two daily-habit consumer brands, Soylent and Lucy, both science-led and sold direct.
Lucy's Excel pouches sell focus to finance and tech workers with deadpan copy about "shareholder value."
"We reformulated nicotine gum and the improvements that we made were to the taste, the texture and the nicotine release speed."
"People use nicotine because they enjoy it."
"I don't want anyone underage using any nicotine product or any drug in general."
Mission, repeated like a mantra: reduce tobacco-related harm to zero.
By 2026, the culture had drifted toward Renteln rather than away from him. Nicotine resurfaced as a productivity-and-wellness talking point, traded among biohackers and desk workers the way cold plunges and creatine had been. Renteln turned up on Dave Asprey's "The Human Upgrade" podcast in January, talking through how the molecule works, and Lucy featured prominently in coverage of the trend that February.
Growth in a vice category never travels in a straight line. Lucy has tangled with regulators, including a settlement with San Francisco over flavored-product sales - the cost of operating in a space where the rules keep moving. Renteln's bet is that disciplined, adults-only branding and genuine product quality are what survive the scrutiny. The same instinct that kept Lucy's ads pointed at ex-smokers instead of teenagers is the one that has to carry it through the next decade.
Strip away the category and the story is unfussy. A biologist who likes to start from how people actually behave, who has now redesigned two of the things people do every single day without thinking. He keeps picking habits the market treats as settled and asking the same question a good product manager always asks: why does this still feel so bad to use?