new school investing- you can sit with us
Kelley Arena, founder of Golden Hour Ventures (and now HALO). I hope you enjoy this sporadic cadence of consumer investor news.
Table of Contents
Locked In
🤰Introducing our brand new baby…HALO!
HALO is Here
Join Annie and I next Thursday at 1 pm to hear our lessons from investing in over 50 startups and why we decided to build a private membership club of people who are shamelessly obsessed with consumer brands.
If you have ever said "I saw that one coming" about a company you did not own a piece of, you know exactly what Halo is for.
🎪 BIG HUGE EVENT for consumer investors (angels, VCs family offices, and the angel curious)
angelfest.nyc
ANGELFEST is an all day event on October 14 at The Bowery Hotel, NYC. The morning is dedicated to investor alpha and the future of the consumer world. The afternoon is dedicated to breakout sessions, pitch competition, and some very cool surprise brand activations.
Tickets are live (and free for HALO members). If you're interested in being a part of the event as a partner, or if you're a brand looking to activate hit us up at [email protected]
NEW In the Portfolio
💰Sleep or Die is in the portfolio! Lauren Sudeyko built a sleep brand that sounds like it was named at 2am on a bad night, which is the point. A listerine strip style format that gently nudges you to sleep in 10 to 15 minutes, with no influencer budget or softened wellness energy. Sleep or Die is breaking the very sleepy category of sleep. Led by True Beauty Ventures - It was a hot deal, and we are proud to be in it, especially so because she is one of our own (Dream Ventures Accelerator graduate!)
Loving!
Sweet Chemistry hydra serum- already on my third. The science is solid - they've already raised some seed capital. Who wants to intro me to this founder so I can get in the next one.
A real shipping option on the Sleep or Die website "hand delivered by a hot shirtless man. $2,000. 4-7 business days (we're not joking)"
Dimwit launched a premium designer light switch hardware, sculptural ball knobs, earthy colorways. I LOVE THEM.
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DIMWITs hardware
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Stone suplier Solid Nature and design studio OMA made a full convenience store out of marble as a product display.
In the wild: loosies at the hostess stand at Schmuck
Opposite of above- 12 months into my Superpower membership and saved myself from a decade-long vitamin D deficiency and dead person-iron levels- and every time I re-test my blood work, they come to my house at 6:00 AM, so I never reaaaalllly have to fast. You should do it.
Trend I am Watching
Big Pouch Is Coming…
Zyn taught a generation of adults to park something in their upper lip at work, in the car, mid-workout, and nobody blinked. That behavior is the asset. The nicotine market it was built on hit roughly $5.4B globally in 2024 with projections near $25B by 2030, and a wave of founders looked at that number and asked the obvious question: what else fits in the pouch?
Answer so far is caffeine, then paraxanthine, then a nootropic stack. Ultra is the proof point, with $11M from Left Lane and a million cans in six months on a product with no caffeine and no nicotine in it at all. Wip is the one to watch, because Richard Mumby already built the Juul playbook once and is running it on a legal, unregulated, kid-safe-ish substrate.
The whole category is a bet that the form factor was the innovation and the drug was incidental. Discreet, dry, portable, no can, no crash, no sugar, no smell. It is what powders were to energy drinks, and Circana has powders and concentrates growing about twice as fast as liquids in brick and mortar.
Can I be a Hater Rq
nope
Hot Deals🔥
831 Stories, the Marvel of Romantic fiction, just announced a partnership with Hulu! From Hollywood Reporter: The first project under the deal is a TV adaptation of Alexandra Romanoff’s Big Fan book series from 831 Stories, anchored by the imprint’s top-selling title, Big Fan.
There are a few more stealthy updates 831 has yet to announce. Reply to request allocation- nearly full on this one (again! we ran an oversubscribed syndicate for the seed last July) with priority given to current investors and HALO members.
GOB 🌿 GOB is creating the nontoxic toolkit for your body — bio-based earplugs, nasal strips, and mouth tape replacing the petrochemical products you've been putting on your body for years without thinking twice. The missing layer in your clean routine.Raising $3M seed — direct checks welcome, SPV open for smaller check angels (reply to request more info)
📰News and Food for Thought
Musely closes $360M from General Catalyst's CVF. Non-dilutive. DTC telemedicine for skin, hair, menopause. Cash flow positive, 1.2M patients, no equity traded. The structure is worth studying.
Bathhouse closes $35M from Imaginary Ventures. "Sauna Wars" is a funded category now.
Sideline Group raises $155M on the offline economy thesis. Live events, physical presence, the room as the product. I've been seeing the IRL thesis pop up all over the venture community.
TrueShort raises $12M from Khosla + Jeffrey Katzenberg. AI-generated vertical films at $1-3K per episode vs. $100-300K standard. The content math is wild.
Clair Health raises $11.6M for a bloodless wearable hormone monitor. Jenny Duan is 21 and a Stanford grad. "The idea that women's bodies are predictable and interchangeable is one of the biggest myths in healthcare."
Rem3dy Health lands £14M for 3D-printed personalized supplements. Format to watch.
Nopalera raises $4M Series A led by Morgan Stanley's Next Level Fund. Sandra Velasquez building.
Gleezy closes $2M seed for premium double-smoked beef brisket hot dogs + Carolina Dog Sauce. BFY hot dog lesssgo
Salt & Stone acquired by Advent International in a $500M+ deal. $165M revenue. One deodorant sold every five seconds. Olaplex's PE firm takes the body care bet.
GLP-1 drugs may be reshaping the brain. Researcher Allison Shapiro found brain scans of teens with hormonal disorders looked measurably different after GLP-1s. Connections in the salience network multiplied within months. Ozempic is now medicine's largest unplanned neuroscience experiment.
Two brothers used AI to build a $1.8B company with almost no employees. NYT had it. "Super efficient, and a little bit lonely
AI token spend about to outpace employee spend. Harry Stebbings on 20VC “If you're building anything, this should change something on your roadmap.”
🌈 Founder’s Corner
Dream Ventures Accelerator 💸-Cohort 15 of the Dream Ventures Accelerator has juuuust a few spots left- if you are raising in the next six months and want a community behind you and a solid fundraising process WE GOT YOU- Apply here.
A read to light a fire :
Start Building your Personal Brand Already SHEESH You know you've been procrastinating on building that personal brand. Me too. SO we brought in the experts to help us all figure it out. Led by the Dream Ventures Accelerator, in partnership with Cultish, this one-day session will have you off to the races. September 28 TICKETS HERE
🍦Other Things No One Asked For
FROM MY GROUP CHATS/ALGO
If you didn’t catch this last month - do yourself a favor and watch this. The choreo at 4:30 onwards made me feel things. AI COULD NEVER. Bless the people that continue to make art.
Related: This South Korean beatboxer performing "Dopamine" live using only his voice. Top comment: "Rumor is this guy just follows Keanu Reeves wherever he goes."
@mortedanger I want him permanently launched into orbit
Kelley
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