Barely three months after announcing its Series A, San Francisco-based Found just closed a new $100 million round.
The Series B raise was led by WestCap and also included IVP, The Chernin Group, G9 Ventures, Able Partners, GV, Define and Atomic. The startup also received funding from angel investor Fidji Simo, who left Facebook this summer to become the CEO of Instacart.
In September, the company announced a $32 million raise and also brought on former Bumble executive Sarah Jones Simmer as its CEO.
The new funding "will power investments in our platform, as well as allow us to reach new members and provide them with Found’s toolkit to drive towards healthy outcomes," the company said in an announcement.
Found provides users with clinically based approaches to weight loss and also prescribes medication to users when appropriate. It charges between $99 and $149 per month and encourages users to commit to the program for at least six months.
“We’re taking cues from the body positivity movement,” Simmer told me in September, helping users set goals that "are centered not on a scale but what you’re able to do with your body.”
It has become anecdotally accepted that the pandemic led to a surge of weight gain, at least in the U.S., and while many people certainly did experience this, it might not have been significantly more than previous years.
A study published in July by Epic Research, a division of healthcare software company Epic Systems, shows that nearly as many people lost weight as gained weight over a 12 month period beginning in March 2020. And since 2017, average weight gain in adults averaged less than one pound per year, including during the pandemic.
Other studies have shown similar results, according to the NYT.
The diet and weight loss industry is worth more than $250 billion globally and expected to grow by around 50% over the next five years, according to a recent analysis from Research and Markets. In the U.S., the industry is worth $61 billion, according to a report from the NYT earlier this year.
