Ryan Breslow, the sassy founder and former CEO of Bolt, told MinRegion in 2022 that he would be leaving the one-click checkout company to start a new company in the health and wellness industry called Love. Well, today is not only Global Love Day, but also the launch of Love.
Love already raised $7.5 million last year from investors including Human Capital and MaC Venture Capital. Breslow told MinRegion that the company has since raised another tranche (to bring total funding to just under $20 million) from a group of new and existing investors who had previously backed Bolt, including MaC Venture Capital, Streamlined Ventures and Activant. The fundraising is underway, Breslow said.
Breslow told colleague Connie Loizos nine months ago that Love would be a “people-powered pharma” with a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) infrastructure “where members who buy ‘Love tokens’ using Ethereum or another reserve currency can discuss homeopathic and other . pharmaceutical alternatives, then vote on which of them should be tested in clinical trials. The DAO will then endorse the studies.
Instead, Love will initially launch as a wellness marketplace with 200 curated products initially, such as supplements, health testing kits, and essential oils, including stress reduction and gut health. Love earns a commission on sales.
In discussing that little pivot, Breslow said he and his founding team, including former Bolt colleague Karissa Paddie, chief product and innovation officer, were thinking about starting a crowdsourcing way to conduct token-driven trials and data on wellness products. to generate. “But we realized there were a few more steps to take before that.” It’s also important to note that Breslow’s involvement with another DAO is now the subject of legal action, Forbes reported in March.
“A lot can be done,” Breslow said. “There is no aggregator, there is no marketplace in the space, so there is no basic research. We had to do all of these things, including generate consumer interest, build a consumer database and collect data on the products consumers are most interested in, and piggyback on that going forward to pursue the previous crypto ambitions.
All products on the site go through a series of compliance processes and assessments developed in conjunction with clinical trial company Radicle Science. There are also two scores for each item: a Love score and a Consumer score.
There will also be both online and offline communities to connect people on ‘healing journeys’, for example around mental health, and a library of digital content with wellbeing videos.
Now that the site is live, Love can move forward with expansion plans. It has 700 products vetted and tested and ready to use. New products and categories will be added incrementally and will also be accompanied by educational content, Breslow said. Future iterations of the site will include social trading.
“I’m really digging into what a review means and what a testimonial means,” Breslow said. “We will reward users with points for engagement and reporting to the community on how the product works for them. We also integrate social commerce elements that are actually quite common in Asia. We are inspired by that and we believe that social commerce can play a major role in well-being.”