A Real Ahara Moment - Crunchwraps Aren't Good For You

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Happy Monday, folks.

If eating an entire box of Oreos won’t make you feel good, what will?

We might not all be gym bros at heart, but I also don’t think many of us would deny that choosing to eat nutritious, whole foods on a regular basis has a pretty positive impact on the way that we feel. Maybe it’s just me, but I eat an apple and I feel ready to slide into Rihanna’s DMs. All ❤️ @Rocky

Seriously, though, I do have some pretty Patrick Bateman-esque tendencies, and feeling the need to clarify wtf I mean by that, I’ve always had a massive fascination with the whole bio-hacking movement.

As a very ambitious go-getter, I’m constantly looking for ways to give myself an edge and optimize my daily performance and general feeling in all aspects of my life. My entire life relies on my Fitbit to ensure I’m refueling post-workout and getting enough sleep to balance getting things done with getting them done well. Turns out that getting enough sleep does help. Feels like the type of thing people should talk about…

However, the whole “health is [insert number higher than 60]% nutrition” has always been a toughie, and not just because I could absolutely tear up a sleeve of cookies and enjoy every crumb of it.

You can do all of the macro tracking, basic metabolic rate calculations, and outer edge grocery shopping you want, but at the end of the day, all of our bodies and lifestyles are different, and while my brother can easily put down 4 burgers and still feel the need to supplement it with a 2000 calorie mega protein shake (i wish that was hyperbolic), I need to get a visa to my bathroom at the mere whiff of dairy.

If you’ve ever read any “How X Actor Got Disgustingly Shredded For Y Role!” articles, chances are that you’ve come across a paragraph detailing the extensive and highly personalized diet said star followed with advice from his or her dedicated nutritionist. Unfortunately, most people don’t have a personal dietary professional. As in, 98% don’t.

Ahara is addressing this massive gap, providing highly personalized, science-backed nutrition support at a fraction of the cost of traditional nutritionists.

After users fill out a health questionnaire on personal health history, lifestyle habits, medications, etc, and take a series of mailed medical tests analyzing genetics and biomarkers, the company is able to provide extremely personalized recommendations. I’m talking “what seasoning to use on your roasted chickpeas based on that weird mole on your elbow” personal.

The company emphasizes two priorities, the first on real food as the primary means of sustenance, though the team also offers supplement support geared at addressing its second goal, promoting supple consumption of essential nutrients and minerals. Pretty sure you can just get all of those in Fiji water tho.

Not that Elon believes in science, but for the rest of you, the science is evidence-based and peer-reviewed, adding further support to the growing base of literature demonstrating the effectiveness of personalized nutrition.

Most existing personalized health products stop here, telling you the data but giving no context for what to do with it. Not Ahara.

Personal information is used to create a tailored plan presented to the customer through an easy-to-use dashboard, complete with recipes, shopping lists, and even a guide to eating out, meaning you can have your (Quest Birthday) cake (protein bar) and eat it, too.

The company promises holistic health and nutrition support to promote lifestyles which optimize longevity and everyday wellness. All of the tech CEOs are going to be all over this.

The company has two tiers of subscriptions, the Core (mentioned features) running $149/mo, and the Plus (how original) costing an extra $50 but including fitness classes and product discounts. This might be pricey, but it’s estimated that more than 100,000 people have signed up on its waiting list.

Despite being founded just two years ago, estimates for its full year revenue for 2022 are already around $10 million, a 100% increase from its 2021 numbers. Earlier this year, the company also raised a $10 million seed round led by Greycroft.

If the sign up list wasn’t evidence enough, the market is big, already worth $11.3 billion and growing 15.5% annually to $23.3 billion by 2027. This growth is driven by lots of interest from individuals to really strive for healthy lifestyles, largely a continuation of the pandemic trend.

The industry is fragmented with no clear cut winner. Competitors include Thrive Market which provides a nutrition subscription box, Kurbo which offers personalized coaching, and Noom which is pioneering a psychology-based approach to weight loss. None will be able to compete with the magic that is Sauna Belt tho 👇️ 

The company’s patent-pending algorithm, which it claims offers unrivaled results, creates a real moat. Personalized services are becoming the gold standard across industries, so being able to deliver on this promise would be (g)astronomical.

Further, the team is nutrition royalty, granting a sense of legitimacy that will be tough for competitors to overcome. They carry drool-worthy resumes, and they prolly eat overnight oats or parfaits and stuff. Maybe some kale.

However, there are significant challenges, the first of which will be delivering on the promise of a truly personalized service. For the cost and claims, there is pressure on the team to deliver something which actually differentiates itself from what you can get when you ask the fine folks of Reddit how to get your ex back.

Further, even once this algorithm is perfected, its success relies on some early work on the part of the user, and even if we know it’ll be worth it long-term, we humans be lazy. Consider how many people train their dogs to bring them beers cause they don’t want to make the trip from the couch to the fridge.

Finally, there will be plenty of internet doctors and skeptical people calling BS on the idea of tailoring a nutrient profile based on bloodwork. Frankly, these people are just too smart for the rest of us mere mortals, though, so maybe we should listen to them.

CNO and Co-founder Melina Jampolis is an experienced nutritionist with years of practice, combining clinical with her business experience, including as an author, food/bev founder (had her own protein bars), and as an advisor and nutritionist for health startups and CNN and Forbes.

She started the company with Julie Wainwright. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because she has a knack for starting tech companies as well, including a little one called The RealReal. Her LinkedIn profile contains more CEOs than the Bozeman Airport Executive Lounge in January after Big Sky gets a week of fresh powder.

The rest of the team looks like it could have been assembled by the Lakers, combining decades of experience across Data, Product, Engineering, Supplements, and Performance. These guys could have kept Tom Brady playing for another decade, which, let’s be honest. You never know…

For my fellow health and fitness geeks, this might be the aha(ra) moment we’ve been waiting for to take our performance to the next level.

Aight, now that that’s over, somebody pass the ice cream.

TLDR: Ahara is building a service to offer personalized nutritional support based on customers’ individual genetic and health information. With an emphasis on essential nutrients and food-first (as opposed to supplement-based) dietary habits, the company equips users with all of the information they need to make the healthiest choices at the store and when dining out. Despite a hefty cost, the team’s rapid growth and experienced team appear poised to make personalized nutritional coaching a thing of ease and accessibility.

Growing up in Texas, I was (am) an avid lover of Whataburger. While I admit that my last few visits have had me questioning whether it is still superior to In-N-Out, I still know that I can always trust WhatA. I also know that we can all trust WhatAi to keep us up to date on all things AI. Give them a subscribe to get Whataburger Jr.-sized nuggets of news in your inbox directly 🍔 

Tiger Global’s attempt at some spring cleaning didn’t quite go according to plan. Now, the investment firm looks eligible to be on the next season of Hoarders.

The venture behemoth made headlines a few months ago when it was reported that it was looking to shed a few pounds before its early summer beach trip, selling some of its underperforming early stage portfolio holdings in the secondary market.

As predicted, this went about as well as Antonio Cromartie’s vasectomy, so the institution is now welcoming offers for individual shares rather than in the pool of shares collectively as it had initially attempted.

As one can imagine, not every company in the portfolio will be Cheese Touch-untouchable, so there will likely be a buyer somewhere, though the companies that receive offers are likely the ones Tiger would prefer hodling anyways.

Like lost baggage (thx Spirit), the tough market is also causing problems for future plans, placing more pressure on firms than ever to return something, anything to their LPs, an issue worsened by the nonexistent IPO market.

Tony the Tiger’s bad day got worse when the cereal maker investor announced it had fallen 55% short of its fundraising goal for its next fund, only raising $2.7 billion of the $6 billion it had been targeting.

That's… bad, particularly as that target was already less than ½ the size of its last fund, a massive $12.7 billion pool. On the bright side, everyone else is falling short of their goals, too, but maybe if you aim for the Moon, you can miss and land among the stars?

Eventually, I’m going to get to write about how hot the market is, and how every round was oversubscribed and valuations are getting silly across the board. Until then, @Tiger, might I recommend a bake sale?

Last week, Europeans announced they were taking the rest of the year off to celebrate raising the largest seed round in continental history. This week, they’re cope-eating baguettes and cheese over a newer report that European startups are projected to only raise $51B this year, a 39% drop from last year.

To be fair, this is not much worse than the trends observed everywhere else. Numbers are down around the globe, a grim reflection of our present reality that raising money isn’t easy. Plus, they’re actually pretty in line with pre-pandemic projections, highlighting the blip that was 2021.

Still, lower numbers are lower numbers, largely due to pullbacks from leading US investors which tend to drive most of the fundraising activity… well everywhere #colonialism

The pullback is less severe in earlier stage companies, a pretty common theme across markets, though in all stages, down rounds did make up 20% of all raises.

In tough economic conditions (how many more times can I possible say that in one newsletter???), it’s often the case that truly great companies are started through a combination of forced operational discipline and an abundance of recently laid off talent no longer slaving away to make rich tech richer.

Ten years from now, we’re going to be using some app that we won’t be able to live without that was started this week by some chick who just got laid off at Meta. In fact, companies raising this year with founders who were former tech unicorn employees has topped 1400, one of the highest ever 👀

Though it has nothing to do with startups, I physically cannot not mention Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

You would think that a conversation between two of the richest, “smartest” people in the world would be more mature than those in a middle school cafeteria but nope. We might get a tech founder Fight Night.

As he often does, Elon was taking his hourly scroll through his lovely garden that is Twitter when he came across a comment calling for a fight between the meme lover and Meta founder, to which he responded "I’m up for a cage match if he is lol”

In a response that I still truly cannot believe was real, Zuck answered via Instagram video (notice they both used the platforms they owned lmao?) calling for a time and place. Elon responded with “Vegas Octagon”. What does Mama Musk have to say about this?

I have no words.

Zuck has to be a heavy favorite here, right? I mean, he’s 12 years younger, has been training as an MMA fighter, and Musk is just generally not what you would get when you ask DALL-E to show you the peak of male performance.

Nonetheless, Elon has a significant size advantage, and he claims his signature move, “The Walrus”, includes using that additional weight to just lie on his opponents, crushing them.

I haven’t taken the time to check the Vegas odds yet, but if you can get good value, why not take a waiver on EV boi?

Cheers to another day,

Trey