On Wednesday, women’s health company Perelel said it had bought LOOM, a women’s educational health website, for an undisclosed amount
A founder of LOOM named Erica Chidi will become a strategy advisor for Perelel.
Chidi helped get LOOM off the ground 2017 as an in-person event that taught women about sexual and reproductive health. By 2020, it had grown into a digital platform that women could subscribe to and access courses, content, and group support. The company got $6.5 million from backers such as Slow Ventures and Founders Fund and famous people like Gwyneth Paltrow, founder of Goop, and actress Tessa Thompson.
Chidi told TechCrunch, “I was like the 34th Black woman to raise over a million dollars in venture capital.” She also said she didn’t think she would raise almost $3 million in three months in late 2019. “People were just becoming interested in women’s health now.”
In the meantime, Alex Taylor, Dr. Banafsheh Bayati, and Victoria Thain Gioia started Perelel in 2020 to sell drugs that have been shown to help women’s hormone health. The business says it has sold more than 48 million capsules since its start, more than 120% more than the previous year, and that its product line has grown by 50% year-over-year, but it wouldn’t say how much money it made. In February, it got a $6 million Series A round led by Unilever.
Recently, women’s health has been a big issue in politics and society, especially since the Supreme Court ruled that everyone in the U.S. should not be able to get an abortion.
Thain Gioia, co-CEO of Perelel with Taylor, says that before the company launched, investors asked them how big the women’s health market was for fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum care because they thought it was a slight chance to make money. She told TechCrunch, “The good thing about today is that, at least among investors, they’re realizing that women’s health is a huge untapped opportunity for all of us to take on.”
Even though the numbers show some good growth, most businesses have trouble getting funding these days unless they are AI. Silicon Valley Bank found in a report from 2023 that venture capital has flowed to women’s health companies 314% more than to the total health sector, which has grown by 28%.
A study by Deloitte found that 2% of venture capital dollars going into the health sector went to women’s health companies, bringing the total amount of money going into the industry to $41.2 billion in 2023.
Because of this, Perelel and LOOM were only expected to meet. Earlier this year, Chidi went to brunch with Taylor and Thain Gioia to talk about the next steps for their businesses. Chishti wants to market LOOM.
When Chidi’s app came out in the App Store last October, she knew she wanted to move on and find a company with higher clinical acuity (or market acuity) that could use what they built to help women more comprehensively.
Thain Gioia said, “This kind of purposeful health and education information and content isn’t grouped in any other brand in the category.” “It’s exciting to go from two strong brands to make something completely new.”
In its next steps, Perelel plans to stick to its “broader mission of supporting women and supporting women’s health.”
Over the past few months, LOOM had cut back on its staff, and by the time this week’s sale was over, Chidi was the only worker left. It seems like she doesn’t like to sit around doing nothing. Besides being an assistant to LOOM, she’s also a consultant for other brands, such as Nike. A tenth-anniversary version of the book she wrote ten years ago is being worked on. She said, “I’d love more time to write.”
