Startup Funding: The Gurugram-headquartered digital wellness brand What’s Up Wellness, on Wednesday, announced raising funding of Rs 14.4 crore in its seed funding round led by Unilever Ventures, the venture capital arm of the FMCG brand Unilever. This is the first time Unilever has invested in a health and wellness brand. The other existing angel investors of What’s Up Wellness also participated in the recent fundraising round.
The company in its angel funding, in 2022, raised funding from cofounders of consumer brands such as Sirona, Hygiene and Clovia. The company also participated in the Shark Tank India Season 2, and raised 60 lakhs from three sharks- Aman Gupta of BoAt, Vineeta Singh of Sugar Cosmetics, and Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com.
The company plans to utilise the funding towards ramping up its team, growth and scaling, and the development of new products. The company at present has served more than 2.5 lakh users, and sold over 4 lakh packs of gummies. It has registered a 12x growth in one year. The current annual recurring revenue of the brand is Rs 30 crore, with a repeat customer rate of 40 per cent, as shared by the company in its release.
Pawan Chaturvedi, Partner-Asia at Unilever Ventures said, “Investment in What’s Up Wellness is in line with our strategy of supporting and investing in promising indie brands in the health & wellness space. India presents a large opportunity for the wellness segment and What’s Up Wellness, with its innovative & modern formats, aims to capture this fast-transforming market. We are excited to be early supporters of What’s Up Wellness in their next growth phase.”
Sayantani Mandal and Vaibhav Makhija said, “From the business perspective, we at What’s Up Wellness have witnessed accelerated growth over the last year. We have done this by prioritizing our customers, ensuring that we understand our customers’ needs to the T, and launching relevant, in-demand wellness products for our burgeoning user base. Going forward, we intend to keep scaling and fast-tracking the growth, while continuing to maintain a tight grip on our bottom line and introducing more highly-relevant products. In doing these things, our end goal shall always remain constant – to make wellness fun and frictionless for users.”