Ryan Breslow, the daring founder and former CEO of Bolt, told TechCrunch in 2022 that he was leaving the one-click payment company to start a new company in the health and wellness sector called Love. Well, today is not just International Love Day, but the release of love.
Love previously raised $7.5 million from investors, including Human Capital and MaC Venture Capital, last year. Breslow told TechCrunch that the company has since raised another tranche (bringing total funding to just under $20 million) from a group of new and existing investors that previously backed Bolt, including MaC Venture Capital, Streamlined Ventures, and Activant. Breslow said the fundraising process is continuing.
Breslow told colleague Connie Loizos nine months ago that Love would be a “people-run pharmaceutical company” with a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) infrastructure “where members, who buy “love tokens” using Ethereum or another reserve currency, could discuss homeopathy and more. Pharmaceutical alternatives, and then vote on which ones should be tested in clinical trials. And then the DAO will sponsor the studies.”
Instead, Love launches first as a wellness marketplace of 200 curated starter products, such as nutritional supplements, health test kits, and essential oils, among categories including stress reduction and gut health. Love will earn commission on sales.
Discussing this micro-hub, Breslow said that he and his founding team, which includes former Boltt colleague Carissa Buddy, Chief Product and Innovation Officer, considered starting with a crowdsourcing method to run token-driven trials and generate data on health products, “but we realized there were some steps that have to be taken before that.” Also, it’s important to note that Breslow’s involvement in another DAO is now the subject of legal issues, Forbes reported in March.
“There’s a lot that can be done,” Breslow said. “There is no aggregator, there is no market in space, so there is no basic screening. We had to do all of these things, including generating consumer interest, building a consumer database, collecting data on the products that consumers are most interested in, and then dumping It is in the future to pursue past crypto ambitions.”
All products on the site go through an array of compliance processes and reviews developed in partnership with clinical trial company Radicle Science. For each item, there will also be two scores: the love score and the consumer score.
There will also be online and offline communities to connect people on ‘healing journeys’, for example, around mental health, and a library of digital content with videos on wellbeing.
Now that the site is live, Love can move forward with expansion plans. It has 700 products checked, debugged and ready to go. Breslow said the new products and categories will be added in phases and will also be accompanied by educational content. Future iterations of the site will include social commerce.
“I really expand on what audit means and what certification means,” Breslow said. “We will reward users with points for sharing and reporting to the community on how the product is working for them. We are also incorporating elements of social commerce that are already prevalent in Asia. We are inspired by this and believe that social commerce can play a huge role in health and wellness.”