National, 21 December 2022: Gurugram-headquartered digital-first wellness brand What’s Up Wellness has announced raising an undisclosed amount from a clutch of investors in their maiden angel fundraising round. Prior to this, the company was bootstrapped. They will be utilizing the amount raised through this round for team-building, scaling-up R&D, strategic product development to launch new product categories and towards furthering their brand-building efforts.
What’s Up Wellness’ latest funding round was led by Puneet Sehgal, ex-COO Hopscotch; Sahil Kukreja, Director, The Butternut Co.; Ritika Jaisinghani, Founder, Elaa; Maharshi Ganatra, Partner, MGA; and Ritesh Ritolia, MD & Partner, Boston Consulting Group. The round also saw participation from the founders of industry-leading consumer brands such as Soumya Kant, Co-Founder, Clovia; Deep Bajaj and Mohit Bajaj, Co-Founders of Sirona Hygiene; among other prominent investors.
Speaking about the fundraise, Sayantani Mandal and Vaibhav Makhija, Co-Founders of What’s Up Wellness said, “We are delighted to announce our first angel fundraising round, and extremely thankful to the investors for backing us. As these are individuals who have already disrupted categories and have built large businesses, their backing is a great confidence booster for us. All the investors come with rich experience in building various consumer brands; and thus their learnings and guidance shall be invaluable and will enable us at What’s Up Wellness to grow at an accelerated pace in the near future. Our goal is to provide nutrition in an easy and fun-to-consume way, not limited to just gummies but in whatever way our customer demands. We are always actively listening to our customers; and after speaking to more than 30,000 customers of ours, we have been able to figure out what are the challenges they face daily and how we can solve them effectively without making our consumers put in any extra effort. We now have our growth roadmap ready for the next one year and would be moving into heads-down execution mode.”
Speaking on his investment, Deep Bajaj, Co-founder of Sirona Hygiene said, “While nutrition is a promising and growing category, what struck me about Vaibhav was his clarity on creating this category with differentiated products while staying profitable! His grip on unit economics is commendable. It was a no-brainer to support him and Sayantani in this journey and I am sure they will do really well.”
What’s Up Wellness is a revolutionary wellness brand that aims to make wellness fun and easy-to-consume with its multi-benefit, easily consumable gummies. The company was co-founded by Sayantani Mandal and Vaibhav Makhija in May 2021. Both the co-founders have had a long history of working with several D2C brands in their growth phase, handling their marketing and hitting the right chord with the consumers. Their diverse marketing knowledge has so far helped What’s Up Wellness to build a strong brand and customer base sustainably while being bootstrapped.
At a time when owing to increased intake of junk food and hectic lifestyles, the younger generation is facing multiple lifestyle problems like hair fall, dull skin, sleeping disorders, and so on, and is therefore becoming more mindful towards increasing good nutrients in their diet, What’s Up Wellness has introduced the ultimate solution – a delicious nutrition filler in the form of gummies that has multiple benefits. As of today, What’s Up Wellness has launched two flagship products – What’s Up Beauty Gummies for Hair, Skin, and Nails and What’s Up Sleep Gummies with muscle recovery and nerve relaxation.
While having developed a clear Hero Product strategy backed by a deep understanding of its user needs and intending to keep the brand unisex for the longer haul, the company soon plans to move into other categories as well, and has three other products in the pipeline slated for launch in the next 3 months, which shall include stress-relief gummies and kids multi-vitamin gummies. Moreover, by the 2nd half of the coming year, they plan to move into 2 more product categories – where their underlying brand mission will remain the same – to ensure that the products should not take more than 15 seconds of one’s time to be consumed!
The brand currently stands at an ARR of INR 5 Cr and aims to grow it to over INR 12 Cr over the next six months, with 5 new product launches planned. They are also on path to increase their customer base to 2 lakh users from the current 40,000 users by the 2023 end. In fact, going ahead, What’s Up Wellness is all set to ride a high wave of exponential growth basis their highly efficient product range.