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Julie Wainwright, founder and former CEO of the publicly traded, luxury online consignment company The RealReal, is back with a new startup.<\/p>\n
Called Ahara<\/a>, the Los Angeles-based outfit describes itself as a personalized nutrition company that provides recommendations to its customers after they first fill out a health questionnaire that asks them about their diet and health history, and their age and location, after which they can take a variety of at-home tests for genetic, epigenetic and biomarkers.<\/p>\n According to Ahara, for example, its tests can tell the company how effectively someone is metabolizing specific nutrients; how healthy his or her cells are; and which tests an individual\u2019s blood levels for key nutrients like vitamin D and Omega 3s.<\/p>\n Wainwright isn\u2019t a wellness expert, but after leaving The RealReal last June after running the company for 11 years, she has teamed up with celebrity<\/a> physician-nutritionist Melina Jampolis as cofounder. Jampolis is also the outfit\u2019s chief medical doctor. Indeed, in a quiet press release published yesterday, the duo \u2014 who already feature half a dozen other employees on their site \u2014 including a performance marketer \u2014 say they have themselves contributed to a $10.25 million round that was led by Greycroft, with participation from Headline, SHAKTI, and entrepreneur Sandy Sholl.<\/p>\n Ahara is currently in beta and according to its own literature will operate a freemium model that provides special benefits to \u201cpremium\u201d members.<\/p>\n That the operation appears to require far fewer resources than The RealReal isn\u2019t surprising. Wainwright \u2014 who earlier led the dot.com era company Pets.com \u2014 is coming off of a business that\u2019s beloved by its customers but highly challenging from a margins perspective.<\/p>\n In conversation<\/a> last week with investor Ian Sigalow of Greycroft \u2014 the firm was also an early backer in The RealReal \u2014 he offered his theories about why The RealReal boasts a market cap of just $170 million after reaching a market cap of $2.39 billion<\/a> the day of its IPO three years ago.<\/p>\n Though The RealReal was a \u201creally good idea,\u201d creating a far more vibrant second-hand luxury goods market, the \u201cchallenge with the model is that it is very capital intensive. The storage of the garments is expensive. The way that they procure in such a white-glove manner is expensive.\u201d Wainwright \u201cexecuted really well on the vision, but driving a profitable machine and taking the cost out of it is just very hard to deal with in that business because it\u2019s all basically one-off unique pieces of fashion product, and they all have to be graded. It\u2019s a complicated business to scale.\u201d<\/p>\n Ahara joins a growing spate of digital nutrition startups. Though each has a slightly different flavor, over the last six months, Mighty Health, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup offering a daily health program designed for adults ages 50 and up, raised $7.6 million<\/a> in venture backing; Nourish, a San Francisco-based telehealth platform for nutrition, raised $8 million<\/a> in seed funding; and Zoe, a British\u00a0nutrition and health tracking app, also attracted the attention of VCs, raising \u00a325 million<\/a> from investors, to name just a few.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n