getting female founders funded / recruiting a new wave of investors to get it done.
Hi, I’m Kelley Arena, founder of Golden Hour Ventures. Coming to your inbox to share deal flow, industry news, founder resources, consumer market musings, and things I like.
Table of Contents
🙌 Portfolio Company High Fives
🍰Shop Women-Founded Brands/Current Obsessions
🍦Other Things No One Asked For
What I’ve been up to…
We out there…
Annie and I hosted an investor event in LA for Another Tomorrow’s Series A extension, at the home of Cristina Samper Pearl. We love our growing network of LA investors- and are planning something else for June- let me know if you or your west coast buddies want an invite.
We hosted another investor event for Another Tomorrow with 60 of our favorite angels, in collab with with Ruben Austin and the all in all network at Spring Place NYC.
I spent some time in LA going to some Milken adjacent events and found it to be so productive- I want to plan a juicy event next year during Milken in LA- who wants to do it with me??
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My next investment is in Hey Jane, a telehealth clinic offering safe, affordable, and convenient abortion care (more below). This is exactly the kind of company and founder I want to invest in right now, especially in a political climate where a woman’s rights are not guaranteed.
I am co-leading a syndicate with Annie Evans, Frida Polli and Kara Dennis and hosted an event at Frida’s (gorgeous) home for 85 women who care a whole lot about reproductive rights and access to abortion care.
Lastly- Annie and I hosted our celebration day for cohort 10 of Dream Ventures Accelerator (check out the cohort here). 20 founders flew in for a day of breath work, self care, networking and celebrating with our favorite VCs and angel investors. Next cohort launches end of June- founder friends, apply here.
Hot Deals🔥
There are some great investment opportunities right now with open SPVs for small check investors.
Fun fact that I can’t stop repeating: if 30% of accredited women invested just $10,000 into a woman founded company, we can move over $10 billion.
Another Tomorrow
Another Tomorrow is reinventing fashion as the best-in-class sustainability-native accessible luxury brand – B Corp certified with a fully digitized, transparent and circular business model and an evolving technology infrastructure to optimize for the new circular customer lifecycle.
Why we’re excited:
Globally renowned, values aligned support: Angelina Jolie onboard as Strategic Advisor
Best-in-class and growing distribution: Net-a-Porter, Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Selfridges, Holt Renfrew
Strong economics and reach: ~$800 AOV, 40%+ retention rate, efficient acquisition, early global traction in 50+ countries outside the US
Consistent top-tier press: including the FT, Vogue, and Fast Company in the past quarter alone
Rapid, high-quality community growth: social following +98% YoY, consistent and growing celebrity traction (Angelina Jolie, Ava Duvernay, Greta Gerwig, Katie Holmes, Julianne Moore, Meghan Markle etc.)
Meet the Founder!
VIRTUAL investor event next Wednesday, June 5 9:30am PT/12:30ET: RSVP here
Request Deal access here
Hey Jane
Hey Jane is on a mission to make high-quality care universally accessible, starting with our groundbreaking approach to abortion access and expanding into a full suite of services including birth control, and treatments for vaginal infections and STIs.
Why we’re excited:
Rapid growth: Served over 50,000 patients, with $10M in annualized revenue, managing over 10% of total abortion treatments in key states.
Unmatched Financial Accessibility: Introduced low sliding-scale pricing, partnered with abortion funds, and became the only digital clinic in the space to accept health insurance.
Powerful Brand Presence: Earned unparalleled brand affinity, with thousands of hyper-supportive followers. Today, 40% of patients discover Hey Jane through unpaid channels.
Meet the Founder!
VIRTUAL investor event this Thursday May 30 9:30am PT/12:30 ET: RSVP here
Request Deal access here
Poppy Seed Health
Poppy Seed Health is 24/7 on-demand text app that connects birthing and postpartum people to doulas, midwives and nurses.
Why we’re excited:
With mental health conditions being the #1 cause of maternal mortality, Poppy Seed is leveraging the power of technology and real human connection, to make emotional and mental health support accessible to all.
By partnering B2B (including active partnerships with Mass General and Planned Parenthood) Poppy will has potential to reach 300k members in the next 24 months
Indicate interest via this form
ARI
ARI is an AI personal stylist partnered with William Morris Endeavor. We are building the future of apparel shopping focused on vertical-AI personalized product curation through an intuitive, conversational user experience.
Why we’re excited:
This is an early, pre-seed opportunity backed by 1517 VC, Sequoia Scout, Z Fellows, and strategic individuals such as the co-founder of Venmo, CTO of Linktree, CS faculty @ Stanford, ex-CPO of Hinge, CEO of Miss Universe, and others
Founder Lior Cole, represented by IMG Models worldwide, dropped out of Cornell computer science to build full time. (Kelley note: The demo is WILD and the most fun I have had with AI: think your AI bestie that learns your shopping taste and curates the entire shoppable internet to your taste)
Team composed of individuals with 20 + years of deep technical and AI experience, fashion expertise, and ex-founders with previous exits to Apple and Brightspot.
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🙌 Portfolio Company High Fives
Camilla Marcus, founder of west~bourne, finally releases a cookbook! Fans of the OG west~bourne on Sullivan Street know that this gal can COOK.
SUPERMUSH X BLOND:ISH RAINBOW TICKET CONTEST
Willy Wonka style! Get mushroom gummies, win a trip to Ibiza?Place online order for SuperMush Passion Gummies during the May 4th – June 4th window; 16 golden tickets will be randomly hidden in Passion Gummies
One lucky winner will get A weekend trip to Ibiza for 2 and tickets to a BLOND:ISH show.
📰 News and Food for Thought
M&A /Venture News
L’Oreal Considers A Minority Stake In Amouage: Rumors are swirling around L’Oreal and Omani perfume brand Amouage. According to a report published by Bloomberg, Amouage owner, SABCO Group is seeking a valuation in excess of €3 billion for the business (based on sales of US$210 million)
Experiment, home of my beloved Super Satty (I’ve repurchased 8 times) raised a $3.3m seed round led by Greycroft
Space NK Owners Hired Bankers to Explore Sale: Manzanita Capital has selected Raymond James to conduct a sale of the British beauty retailer.
beehiiv (home of this newsletter) raise a $33M Series B led by NEA (and also held $1m allocation for their users via Wefunder– I like this move) The platform continues to differentiate themselves from main competitor Substack by building an ad network to help creators easily monetize their content.
KEY, a startup led by former PepsiCo and Coca-Cola execs , with a zero-sugar ketone-fueled energy drink, has emerged from stealth armed with $4 million in seed funding. I am bullish on the ketone drink category after slamming one of these at a demo day and feeling like a twelve million energetic dollars afterwards (without the heart attackies).
VF is reportedly shopping the streetwear brand Supreme
Puig IPO Becomes Europe’s Largest in 2024
News / Reads
Levi’s Changes Its Name to ‘Levii’s Jeans’ to Celebrate Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Album Release When the you get a free bump from the Beyhive, you change your name.
The New Empress of Self-Help Is a TikTok Star:
More Young People Are Opting for Permanent Contraception, Study Finds In the years after the end of Roe, more young adults are choosing sterilization, according to new research.
On that note, Bumble to Users: You Need Sex. Users to Bumble: Get Lost. “When the dating app Bumble received backlash over the weekend for an ad campaign telling women that a vow of celibacy is not the answer, the anger came as no surprise.”
The Seed 40: The best women early-stage investors of 2024
Fashion’s Supply Chain Is Still Full of Banned Chinese Cotton (TLDR: US placed a strict ban on products from China’s cotton-producing Xinjiang region over forced labour concerns. And yet cotton from the area is still everywhere.)
This Is the Worst Way to Make an Inclusive Foundation Shade: This was a big miss by Youthforia.
Investors are rethinking how they assess celebrity brand pitches “Investors now want to know in concrete terms how that will impact CAC, customer trial and repurchase rates. As an example, they may want to know how a post from the celebrity founder typically performs compared to a standard brand post.”
JW Marriott and Flamingo Estate Debut a Global Brand Partnership
Psychedelics could treat some of the worst chronic pain in the world
Book Club: This month I read (the aptly named) The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace and then Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility to cope.
🌈 Founder’s Corner
Amid Black Beauty Brand Closures, Glossier Ups Financial Support
Goldman Sachs Report: Black Womenomics: Equalizing Entrepreneurship
Most Innovative Beauty and Personal Care of 2024
Grants/Accelerators:
Boundless Future Foundation Grant (up to 25k and mentorship)
Win a $50k grant for women founders from from AT&T
Mentorship, training, and up to $200,000 in funding for worker-centered innovation from The Innovation Fund
Beauty founders: Apply for Tower 28 Clean Beauty Summer School 2024 (up to 35k in grants, mentorship, guaranteed buyer meetings)
🍰Shop Women-Founded Brands/Current Obsessions
I got this Strange Water at Solomun’s set last weekend and we were all freaking out at how good it is. The sparkling version puts coconut La Croix to shame.
It has been a busy May so dinner is Goodles 4/7 nights a week
These Fazit makeup patches gave me gold freckles for a night of dancing (and strange looks for a morning of kids basketball) and felt cute.
Been into these CANN’s lately – but I drank a full one and then cut my own hair into a Lord Farquaad bob…so maybe just a half a cann?
Mother Tongue Magazine is the coolest mag you have (maybe) never heard of. “It’s not about kids or how to parent them: it’s about the nuanced lives we are living—as mothers, and much more”.
Fiona’s Gucci Pasta Box. This is a good gift.
That’s a pretty pasta
Bailey Hikawa makes phone cases and toilet seats which is a fun niche.
I met Aelfie at the perfectly curated Orchard Street VC launch dinner in LA and now I want more floor so I can get more rug.
Reorder Alert- Soft Services is now buffing in banana and its so good. I LOVE this brand.
🍦Other Things No One Asked For
Would love to befriend Duo Lingo’s social marketing manager. So fast on the draw with BBL Drizzy…
Singing bbl drizzy on repeat today #duolingo #englishtest #studyabroad #workabroad #bbldrizzy @Duolingo
When my kids fight and it goes too far
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