Ask CEO and founder Éva Goicochea which brand she’d like Maude, her sexual wellness startup, to emulate, and you might be surprised by her response: Patagonia, the California-based outdoor clothing company.
“They’re selling a product, but they’re simultaneously committing to change how we all think even if we don’t own the product,” Goicochea says of the brand, which is known for its ubiquitous, if overplayed, fleece vest. Goicochea wants to make the sex toys, lubricants, essential oils and the other intimacy products it sells comparably commonplace in the bedroom. “We’ve long said we’re t-shirt sex,” Goicochea tells Forbes.
On Tuesday, Maude announced a $5.8 million Series A round, bringing its total funding to over $10 million and making it the first product selling personal sex-tech products, like vibrators, to make it past the seed stage in more than half a decade. The only other company to do so was Crave, which raised a smaller $2.4 million Series A in 2013, and has since embarked on an Indiegogo campaign—a popular fundraising option for startups in traditionally taboo categories. Other notable raises in the space have included a 2017 seed round by the woman-led startup Unbound Babes, with participation from Founders Fund, and a recent $6 million seed round by the Los Angeles-based brand Cake, whose products will soon be debuting in Walmart.
Maude first made its intentions to enter the mainstream known back in 2020, when Dakota Johnson, the star of “Fifty Shades of Grey”—the movie adaptation of the book credited with mainstreaming BDSM—signed on as co-creative director. Since then, Maude products have been picked up by higher-end American retailers including Nordstrom, Saks and Bloomingdale’s. The company currently reports annual revenues in the mid-to-high seven figures, and growth of over 200% year-over-year.
Goicochea founded Maude after launching a minimalist watch brand called Tinker with her husband, and spending a year at Everlane, the DTC wardrobe staples brand, where she worked on social media, culture, and talent. Her initial cofounder and CPO, Dina Epstein, left the company in 2019. Goicochea, who is of Mexican, Spanish, and Native American descent, is one of 90 Latinx women to have raised over $1 million in VC funding according to Digitalundivided. Collectively, that capital represents just over 1% of the total VC funding raised in the United States in 2020.
“It’s incredibly exciting,” says Cristina Nuñez of True Beauty Ventures, which led the round. Nuñez will be joining Maude’s all-female and majority Latina board, along with Fable Investment’s Paola Felipak. “The idea is that we’re one piece of the puzzle. We’re investing in the founders, and then of course the retailers also need to create space and embrace those brands,” Nuñez adds.
The backing from True Beauty, whose partners have also invested in brands like Alba Botanica, Deva Curl and Algenist, as well as participation in the round from Fable Investments, the venture arm of the Brazil-based personal care and cosmetic group Natura & Co, is indicative of the fundamental role that wellness brands may play in the future of the beauty industry. Supplement brands like Care/Of and Hum Nutrition have already raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding—the latter is sold at Sephora.
“Sexual wellness does deliver in the same way as good food or good sleep,” says Thomas Buisson, Fable’s Paris-based Director, of Maude’s relevance to Fable’s thesis and interest area—Maude is only the second company, after a U.K.-based perfume brand, to enter the fund’s portfolio. “Instead of becoming a breach, a complete switch, actually it was the continuity of what we’ve been doing.”
Maude has chartered a unique path in the broadly titled “sexual wellness” industry, in which venture capitalists have been wary of investing in startups that focus on sexual pleasure, as opposed to reproductive health. Still, other startups are benefiting both from post-pandemic consumer interest in intimacy and Gen-Z’s relatively open-minded attitude towards sex.
In July, Walmart will begin carrying a suite of lubricants from the venture-backed startup Cake, which originally catered to gay men before expanding its product line and branding itself as “the wellness brand for the sexually active.” As Forbes reported earlier this month, the market opportunity for brands in the sexual wellness space is enormous: $125 billion, market studies allege. Sex is, by all definitions of the word, a popular activity, and Maude is making the most of it.
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June 29, 2021 at 08:00PM
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Sex Product Startup Maude Surpasses $10 Million In Funding, Raises Unprecedented Series A - Forbes
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