A Boulder-based startup that developed lozenges to help people rebalance their hormones and reduce their anxiety, secured a $7.37 million Series C round this week. This funding comes five months after the startup launched its first products.
Rebalance Health was co-founded by Justin Hai, Scott Glenn and others in late 2020. Hai came up with the idea for the startup after his wife was diagnosed with Cushing disease, a condition caused by having too much of the hormone cortisol in your body for a prolonged time.
“Basically, when you’re stressed or you have a fight or flight occurrent, your body shuts down,” said Hai, who also serves as the CEO and president of Rebalance Health. “It doesn’t need metabolism. It doesn’t need libido. It doesn’t need all that. It’s trying to be in a survival mode. So all kinds of hormone production get reduced and that natural instinct kicks in. In my wife’s case, it was all the time.”
Hai, who previously worked in the skincare industry developing natural healing products, knew cortisol suppresses hormones. This led him to wonder if lowering his wife’s cortisol levels would help her body naturally rebalance and produce the hormones it needs.
Hai researched solutions and treatment options and found a gap in the market. Most hormone replacement therapy products addressed symptoms but didn’t help the body rebalance. The latter was his goal.
After speaking with doctors and cortisol experts, Hai assembled a team of scientists and medical experts and began developing Rebalance Health’s products in early 2021.
The Rebalance Health team found natural ways to address hot flashes, anxiety and low testosterone levels. The result is a suite of hormone-free solutions called The Rebalance Systems. Each system comes with three products — a morning, afternoon and bedtime lozenge — that help restore people’s hormone and anxiety levels, according to the company.
“It’s not a magic pill,” Hai said. “You have to rinse and repeat every four to five, six hours because you have a metabolism that takes those ingredients and metabolizes."
According to Rebalance Health's website, the products are intended to be used for at least three months, but consumers can see a difference in their symptoms in one month.
“[In studies] we found that around two weeks, women’s estrogen levels started to skyrocket as cortisol levels came down,” Hai said. “We noticed that men’s testosterone started to increase as cortisol went down. What we didn’t anticipate was the hot flashes [were] eliminated from women in our study as the cortisol went down and as estrogen was rebalanced.”
The abstract from this study is expected to be published later this year.
Rebalance Health products are free of sugar, dairy, soy and gluten, and also have no additives, dyes or preservatives. Instead, they are made with natural ingredients like mushrooms, beetroot powder, sage, ashwagandha, ginger and fenugreek, to name a few.
The company plans to use its $7.37 million Series C to accelerate its launch and increase its marketing efforts. The startup is actively hiring for a senior vice president of marketing and will soon hire customer service and warehouse employees.
The startup's 15-person team works in a hybrid model, coming to the Boulder office on South 57th Court at least four days a week.
The Series C round, which came from unnamed venture capital firms and angel investors, brings Rebalance Health’s total funding to date to about $19 million, according to Hai.
