Michelle
Larivee

An investment banker walks into an acupuncture clinic

She does not walk out the same. The pain that prescription pads could not touch loosens after a session with needles and herbs. The banker takes notes. Within a few years she is the CEO of the company she wished had existed.

Michelle Larivee runs WTHN, the New York wellness brand that treats acupuncture the way Drybar treated the blowout: strip out the mystery, fix the design, kill the waitlist, and let people walk in. Today that means a handful of studios across the city, a product line of acupressure tools and herbs sold in more than 200 retail doors including Ulta Beauty, and a fresh $5M Series A led by L Catterton. The thesis is almost rude in its simplicity. Two thousand years of clinical tradition, and the biggest thing standing between it and a first-time patient was a booking page that said "next available: three months from now."

What makes the story land is who is telling it. Larivee is not a lifelong healer who learned to run a P&L. She is the reverse - a finance operator who learned, on her own body, that the system she had spent over a decade financing had a gap in it. She built WTHN to fill that gap with the same instinct she once used to structure debt for hospitals: find the inefficiency, price it, fix it.

Thirteen years before the first needle

The detail that stops people cold is the CV. Larivee began as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, structuring debt financings for the largest hospitals and academic medical centers in the country. She moved to IFC, the World Bank's private-equity arm, where she made investments across the pharmaceutical and consumer sectors in Africa, the Middle East and South America. Then five years at Deloitte Consulting, with a secondment to the World Economic Forum to help run its Blended Finance Initiative - the kind of public-private deal-making that gets discussed in Davos, not on a treatment table.

She studied at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and earned her MBA at Wharton with a focus on entrepreneurship. None of it screams "future acupuncture CEO." All of it explains why WTHN is run like a company and not a wish. When she looked at the category, she did not see a spiritual calling. She saw a market with no good product in it.

The slow quit

There is a founder myth Larivee enjoys puncturing: that real conviction means burning the boats on day one. She did the opposite. WTHN started as a deliberate side project, a sequence of milestones, each one a small dare to keep going.

The other half of the equation was her co-founder, Dr. Shari Auth, an acupuncturist with two decades of practice across Chinese medicine and physical therapy. They were introduced by one of Shari's clients and joined forces in 2016. The split is clean and obvious in hindsight - the clinician who knows the medicine cold, the operator who knows how to turn it into a brand people trust. WTHN launched in 2018.

What a $5M bet looks like

In early 2024 WTHN closed a $5M Series A led by consumer specialist L Catterton, with participation from Jesse Draper's Halogen Ventures and a roster of strategic angels - operators from SoulCycle, Heyday and Sweetgreen, brands that each cracked the code on making a service feel like a habit. The round funded a new Williamsburg studio and the omnichannel push onto Ulta's shelves.

Davos to the front desk

• EARLY CAREERInvestment banker at Merrill Lynch, structuring debt for major U.S. hospitals and academic medical centers.
• MID CAREERInvestor at IFC, the World Bank's private-equity arm, across pharma and consumer deals in Africa, the Middle East and South America.
• ~5 YEARSLeading teams at Deloitte Consulting; seconded to the World Economic Forum's Blended Finance Initiative.
• 2016Joins forces with Dr. Shari Auth to build a modern acupuncture brand.
• 2018Co-founds and launches WTHN in New York City.
• 2024$5M Series A led by L Catterton; opens Williamsburg studio; launches in Ulta Beauty.

In her own words

Larivee on the Fitt Insider podcast, breaking down how WTHN modernized one of the oldest practices in medicine.