Bolt founder and former CEO Ryan Breslow told TechCrunch in 2022 that he left the one-click checkout company to start a new health and wellness company called Love. Well, today is not only World Love Day, but also the inauguration of love.
Love raised $7.5 million last year from investors including Human Capital and Massey Venture Capital. Breslow told TechCrunch that the company has raised another round (bringing total funding to just under $20 million) from a group of new and existing investors that have backed Bolt in the past, including Macy Venture Capital, Streamlined Ventures and Activant. Fundraising continues, Breslow said.
Breslow told his colleague Connie Loizos nine months ago that Love would be a “people-run pharmacy” with a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) infrastructure, where “members who buy Love tokens in Ethereum or other reserve currency can talk about homeopathic and other medicine options, and then which of them are in clinical trials.” Give it a try. Dao writes the studies.
Instead, Love will initially launch as a wellness marketplace offering 200 curated products across categories such as supplements, health screening kits, and essential oils for stress reduction and gut health. Love earns a commission on sales.
Discussing that small pivot, Breslow said he and his founding team, including former Bolt colleague Carissa Paddy, chief product and innovation officer, plan to launch a crowdfunding approach to conduct token-based trials and generate data on wellness products. But we realized there were a few steps that needed to be taken before that. Also, Forbes reported in March that Breslow’s involvement in another DAO is now the subject of legal issues.
“There’s a lot that can be done,” Breslow said. “There’s no aggregator, no marketplace in space, so there’s no basic filtering. We had to do all of these things, including generating consumer demand, building a consumer database and gathering information about the products that consumers were most interested in, and then going back in time to chase those early crypto aspirations.
All products on the site go through standardized procedures and evaluations developed in partnership with clinical trials company Radical Science. There will also be two scores for each item: a love score and a consumer score.
There will be both online and offline communities to connect people on “healing journeys,” for example, around mental health, and a digital content library with safety videos.
Now that the site is live, Love can move forward with expansion plans. It has 700 refined and refined and ready-made products. Breslow said new products and categories will be added in phases, along with educational content. Future iterations of the site will include social commerce.
“I’m expanding what a review means and what a testimonial means,” Brezlow said. “We reward users with points for engaging and reporting to the community how the product is working for them. We are integrating the most widespread social business entities in Asia. We are inspired by this and believe that social business can play an important role in health.”
