consumer-health
(37)
The Pet Store That Followed Ukraine West - Then Doubled in Size
MasterZoo lost access to most of its stores when Russia's full-scale invasion began. It answered by moving with its customers, rebuilding its logistics and growing from a regional chain into a national pet-care system.
The $2.9 Billion Vitamin Cabinet That Learned to Travel
iHerb began with one herbal remedy and grew into a cross-border machine for the bathroom cabinet. Its real product is confidence - the right bottle, from a traceable source, delivered before global distance becomes the customer's problem.
The Hearing-Aid Company That Put the Internet in the Waiting Room
audibene did not try to squeeze an audiology clinic into a browser. It built a digital front door, then kept the local expert in the room.
Kenvue
Spun out of Johnson & Johnson with Tylenol, Neutrogena and Band-Aid in tow, Kenvue became the biggest name in consumer health almost overnight - then spent 2025 fending off activists, a CEO exit, an autism-claim firestorm and a $48.7 billion buyout.
Bayer
Bayer is trying to make one science company work at three speeds: the long clock of drug discovery, the seasonal rhythm of farming and the everyday urgency of self-care. Its turnaround will depend on whether that range becomes an advantage rather than a burden.
Samantha Avivi
After three decades moving between agencies, consumer brands, consulting and the automotive aisle, Samantha Avivi has arrived at Bayer's global CMO seat with a durable operating idea: trust is built by listening closely, making boldly and giving teams room to grow.
Haleon
The company you have never heard of makes the toothpaste, painkillers and vitamins you buy without thinking. Here is how GSK's cast-off brands became a £30 billion bet on self-care.
Pineapple Products
Pineapple Products is a direct-to-consumer health supplement company that builds and operates a portfolio of consumer wellness brands. Founded by Brett Allcorn, it started as classroom seminars in New York City and grew into a house of brands that pairs original product formulations - including probiotics with unique metabolic strains - with strong storytelling and partnerships with doctors, personalities, and influencers. The company creates, markets, and oversees smaller brands under a single parent, aiming to build products it believes don't yet exist in the market.
IM8 (David Beckham & Danny Yeung's health drink startup)
IM8 is a premium longevity supplement brand co-founded by soccer icon David Beckham and serial entrepreneur Danny Yeung, operating as a consumer-health subsidiary of Nasdaq-listed Prenetics. In July 2026, IM8 secured $1 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund (CVF), a non-dilutive facility that funds up to 70% of customer-acquisition spend in exchange for a capped share of cohort revenue rather than equity. Launched in December 2024, IM8 became the fastest-growing premium supplement brand on record, hitting roughly $100 million in annualized revenue within eleven months, and the capital is meant to pour fuel on marketing while ownership stays undiluted.
Mikael Svensson
Mikael Svensson is Chief Executive Officer of SaNOtize Research and Development Corp., the Vancouver-based company commercializing nitric oxide as an antimicrobial platform, most recently through its NOWONDER consumer nasal cleanser. A chemical engineer by training with more than two decades in medical device and pharmaceutical commercialization, he previously led the global launch of INOmax inhaled nitric oxide therapy and worldwide expansion work on Restylane, Naftin, Mederma and VagiVital.
Rony Sellam
Rony Sellam is the CEO of InsideTracker, a Cambridge, Massachusetts based personalized-health company that uses blood biomarkers, DNA and lifestyle data to give consumers actionable recommendations for extending healthspan. A former Deloitte consultant from France by way of Geneva and a longtime healthcare IT executive, he has run InsideTracker for over a decade and helped push the company past 100,000 members and into partnerships with Oura and Fitness SF.
Great Many
Great Many is a New York-founded hair growth company that pairs in-studio clinical treatments - PRP injections and FDA-cleared laser therapy - with a telehealth platform and a line of growth-focused hair care products. Started in 2024 by Heyday co-founder Michael Pollak and former Estee Lauder omnichannel VP Steve Klebanow, it treats hair loss as a health category rather than a taboo, building consultative studios (NYC, Atlanta, Washington DC) around scalp assessments, microscopic follicle imaging and clinician-led plans for both men and women.
NeuroAge Therapeutics
NeuroAge Therapeutics is a San Francisco tech-bio company that measures how old your brain actually is - and tries to make it younger. Founded in 2022 by physician-scientist Dr. Christin Glorioso, the company's flagship NeuroAge Test blends brain MRI, cognitive games, proprietary RNA blood biomarkers, and genetic screening into a single 'brain age' score that aims to flag dementia risk up to 30 years before symptoms appear. The longer-term goal is bolder: small-molecule drugs that reprogram aging neurons back toward a younger state.
Primal Health
Primal Health is a Minneapolis-based molecular biotechnology company reinventing oral care by rebalancing the microbiome instead of nuking it. Founded by Berkeley-trained microbiologist Dr. Emily Stein, the company uses its patented SMMRT (Selective Microbial Metabolism Regulation Technology) to put harmful mouth bacteria on a 'keto diet' - blocking their ability to feed on sugars while feeding the beneficial ones. Its two brands, Daily Dental Care for people and TEEF for Life for pets, deliver clinically studied lozenges and prebiotic powders that support gum health, fresher breath and a healthier oral ecosystem for humans and animals alike.
Pandia Health
Pandia Health is a doctor-founded, women-led telehealth company that prescribes and delivers birth control, acne treatment, and menopause hormone therapy across the United States. Founded in 2016 by Stanford-affiliated physician Dr. Sophia Yen and a team of clinicians and operators, the company built its business on a simple bet: most American women still struggle to get continuous access to hormonal medication, and a recurring, mail-order subscription paired with a board-certified physician network can fix it.
Emily Stein
Emily Stein is a microbiologist turned founder and CEO of Primal Health, the Minneapolis life-sciences company behind Daily Dental Care for people and TEEF for Life for pets. Trained at UC Berkeley and Stanford, she spent more than a decade building SMMRT (Selective Microbial Metabolism Regulation Technology), a 'carrot and stick' approach that starves harmful mouth bacteria and feeds the helpful ones instead of nuking everything. Holder of 18 patents and a five-time startup founder, Stein pivoted from humans to dogs when dentists balked, a move she says saved the company. Her stated goal: to be in every mouth at least once a day.
Hasti Nazem
Hasti Nazem is the Co-CEO and Head of Product and Education at Kindra, a New York-based, science-backed women's health brand building estrogen-free solutions for menopause, vaginal health and intimate care. With roughly a decade at the intersection of life sciences, consumer brand-building and wellness, she co-leads the company alongside Afshan Dosani, grounding products in 160+ clinical studies and patent-pending peptide technology. She came to the work through a winding path: a family of physicians, a pre-med start, a detour into finance before the 2008 crash, and a return to school that led her to build wellness companies focused on sleep and, later, women's health.
Michael Pollak
Michael Pollak is a New York based serial founder who keeps spotting personal-care rituals stuck in old-fashioned settings and rebuilding them as warm, branded experiences. He co-founded Heyday, the company that pulled the facial out of the spa and grew it into a national chain, then in 2024 launched Great Many, a hair growth studio and telehealth brand in NoHo that treats thinning hair with the comfort of a lounge and the rigor of a clinic. Trained at the Cornell Hotel School, he leads with hospitality instincts and gut-first decisions.
Concerto Biosciences
Concerto Biosciences is a Cambridge, Massachusetts microbiome company that turns microbial ecology into health products. Its patented kChip platform screens millions of microbial interactions in nanoliter droplets to discover 'ensembles' - small, defined groups of microbes that work together to shepherd a damaged microbial community back to health. The company's lead program, ENS-002, is a topical live biotherapeutic for atopic dermatitis that suppresses Staphylococcus aureus without nuking the skin's helpful microbes. Founded in 2020 by scientists out of MIT and the Broad Institute, Concerto pairs ultra-high-throughput biology with AI to make microbial communities predictable and engineerable.
Huckleberry Labs
Huckleberry Labs is an Irvine, California parenting-technology company that pairs pediatric expertise, data science, and AI to help families improve children's sleep and daily routines. Its Huckleberry app tracks sleep, feeding, and development, and uses the SweetSpot predictive engine to recommend optimal nap and bedtime windows. Founded in 2017 by Jessica Toh and Seng Oon Toh after their own sleepless nights as new parents, Huckleberry is used by more than 5 million families worldwide and has expanded into context-aware AI guidance with the 2026 launch of Berry.
Magic Mind
Magic Mind makes a 2-ounce 'mental performance shot' built from a blend of around a dozen nootropics, adaptogens, vitamins and antioxidants - think lion's mane, ashwagandha, L-theanine and ceremonial matcha - designed to deliver calm focus without the jitter-and-crash cycle of a big cup of coffee. Founded in 2020 by James Beshara and William Hicks, the brand started in a San Jose commercial kitchen, grew through direct-to-consumer subscriptions, and has since pushed into national retail including Whole Foods, Erewhon, Sprouts and Albertsons. It raised a $12.4M Series A in September 2025.
RYZE Superfoods
RYZE Superfoods is a Boston-based direct-to-consumer wellness brand best known for its mushroom coffee - a blend of organic instant coffee, organic fiber, and a six-mushroom 'Super6' functional blend (cordyceps, lion's mane, reishi, turkey tail, shiitake, and king trumpet). Founded in 2020 by Harvard classmates Andrée Werner and Rashad Hossain, RYZE pitches a calmer, lower-caffeine ritual that delivers focus and immune support without the spike-and-crash of regular coffee. The company grew largely on early seed money plus aggressive social and influencer marketing, reaching reported revenue in the tens of millions while expanding into matcha, hot cocoa, creamers, and other functional blends.
Eric Marcotulli
Eric Marcotulli is the co-founder and CEO of Elysium Health, a New York consumer health company he started in 2014 to turn academic aging research into products people can actually buy. A former wrestler who became Sequoia Capital's youngest partner before he turned 30, he left venture capital after a business-school case study on cellular aging convinced him that longevity was a solvable engineering problem, not a fairy tale. He built Elysium by recruiting Nobel laureates and a roster of world-class scientists as advisors, raising more than $70 million across several rounds, and selling directly to consumers.
ONVI, LLC.
ONVI is a Chicago-based oral health technology company building what it calls an operating system for dental care. Founded by dentist Dr. Craig S. Kohler, the company pairs camera-equipped brushes - led by the Prophix video toothbrush - with a HIPAA-compliant software platform, ONView, that links what people see in their own mouths to their dentists. In August 2025 ONVI launched a $25 million Series A to commercialize a six-product hardware-and-software system aimed at closing the visibility gap between dental visits.
Create Wellness
Create Wellness is a New York-based consumer health company that built the world's first creatine monohydrate gummy, turning a messy, bodybuilder-coded powder into a low-sugar daily habit. Founded in 2022 by husband-and-wife team Dan and Sienna McCormick, the brand sells creatine gummies, electrolyte stick packs, and unflavored powder direct-to-consumer and through Target, GNC, The Vitamin Shoppe, Sprouts, and Wegmans. With more than 250 million gummies sold and $25M+ raised across Series A and Series B rounds, Create is trying to take creatine from the 2% of people who use it to the other 98%.
Pawp
Pawp is a New York-based digital health clinic for pets that gives members unlimited 24/7 access to licensed veterinarians by chat and video, plus an optional $3,000 emergency fund - all on a single low monthly plan that covers up to six dogs and cats per household, with no age, breed, or pre-existing-condition restrictions. Pitched as an affordable alternative to traditional pet insurance, it aims to cut out unnecessary vet visits and prevent the financial euthanasia that happens when owners can't afford emergency care.
Dan McCormick
Dan McCormick is the co-founder and CEO of Create Wellness, the New York brand that turned creatine from a bodybuilder's powder into a daily gummy. After years inside high-growth consumer companies like Away, Parade and the Not Boring newsletter, he started Create in 2022 with his wife Sienna and pioneered the first creatine monohydrate gummy. The company has sold over 250 million gummies, reached GNC and Target shelves, and raised a $20M Series B in 2026 led by Alliance Consumer Growth.
Sienna McCormick
Sienna McCormick is the co-founder and co-CEO of Create Wellness, the New York company that turned creatine - long stuck in the bodybuilder aisle - into a daily gummy. After six years at Goldman Sachs, she and her husband Dan bootstrapped the brand from their apartment in 2022, shipped the first creatine monohydrate gummy after more than twenty manufacturers said it could not be done, and have since sold north of 250 million of them. In March 2026 the company raised a $20 million Series B led by Alliance Consumer Growth, with the stated ambition of getting 100 million Americans onto daily creatine by 2030.
GoodRx
GoodRx is a Santa Monica-based digital healthcare platform that helps Americans find lower prices on prescription drugs. It aggregates real-time pricing and discounts from pharmacies nationwide so consumers can compare costs and access free coupons, then layers on telehealth visits, manufacturer savings programs, and tools for pharma and employers. Since 2011 it has helped tens of millions of people save an estimated $70+ billion on medications.
Bobn L
Bobn L is the Chief Executive Officer of GoodRx, the Santa Monica-based digital health company that has become America's most-used prescription savings platform. GoodRx tracks drug prices across 75,000+ pharmacies nationwide, delivering coupons and transparency to millions of Americans navigating the opaque world of prescription pricing. Under executive leadership, GoodRx has grown to nearly $800 million in annual revenue, gone public on Nasdaq (GDRX), and expanded into telemedicine - all in service of a single idea: that patients deserve to know what their medications actually cost.