AI-Powered Women’s Wellness Marketplace Unfabled Raises $1.6M To Expand International Reach And Data Insights

Unfabled has raised $1.6 million in funding from several backers, including Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Group, Exceptional Ventures, Founders Factory, Chai Ventures, SyndicateRoom and 3 Sisters Ventures.

Headquartered in London, the marketplace for menstrual and hormonal well-being has pulled in a total of $2 million, and angel investors provided a previous tranche of $400,000. The latest round comes during a particularly active stretch for capital directed toward the period care segment. In January alone, Compass Diversified acquired The Honey Pot Company, Forum Brands purchased Lola, and Vyld secured a seven-figure funding deal.

Founded in 2021, Unfabled’s data-driven platform offers more than 350 women’s health and wellness products spanning period care, sexual and intimate wellness, skincare and menopause from brands like Daye, Luna Daily, Maude, Semaine, Hanx and Saalt. Unfabled presents consumers with a series of questions about their hormonal and health priorities and recommends a set of curated products based on their answers.

To date, over 300,000 people have used Unfabled. It has a community of 50,000 engaged women, and its educational content has attracted in excess of 40 million women.

Unfabled currently only ships within the United Kingdom, but is planning to employ the funding it’s raised to fuel international expansion this year. Examining purchases made through the platform, founder Hannah Samano says, “Products targeting stigmatized hormonal symptoms perform really well. We see strong engagement with innovations in menstrual care like menstrual discs and period pants as well as sexual wellness.” 

The funding will also be deployed to rev up Unfabled’s in-house data science, which underpins its consumer-facing e-commerce and a business-to-business product supplying insights for healthcare companies and other businesses helping propel advancements in women’s health. The artificial intelligence-powered personalization software was a draw for investors.

Samano says, “An e-commerce marketplace has not been the easiest ride, and if that is what we were, I would not have managed to raise the capital.” 

From consumer packaged goods conglomerates like Reckitt to pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Samano has been positively surprised by the corporate world’s willingness to invest in women’s health and female founders guiding companies in the space. In contrast, she’s discovered venture capitalists don’t exhibit the same willingness. 

She says the corporations “understand how trends work and that these things take time…[VCs] operate largely in what is a short-term vacuum, thinking constantly about five-year horizons and pattern matching, needing to understand how I can model this in line with case studies that are exactly like you…The data doesn’t exist yet because there haven’t been those big exits or they don’t know where these companies go or what the outcome looks like. I see a huge aversion from VCs to back these types of brands and businesses.”

Prior to launching Unfabled, Samano spent three years at Unilever, where she was an investment analyst at Unilever Ventures, the company’s VC arm, and held roles in digital marketing and global e-commerce. She left Unilever in 2018 to become head of product at Kasha, a Kenyan women’s health startup that had a partnership with Unilever. The company closed a $21 million series B round in July and is the biggest women’s health startup in Africa. 

Samano says she’s passionate about bringing her brand-building and direct-to-consumer skillset to “a space that has been so underserved, so under nurtured and so stigmatized.”