Digital health and nutraceutical company Wellkasa has acquired supplement brand Peak + Valley for an undisclosed price.
Nadine Joseph, founder of Peak + Valley, which sells $29.99 adaptogenic capsules Restore My Sleep, Nourish My Brain and Balance My Stress, will stay on as an advisor to Wellkasa co-founders Melissa and Sumit Mehrotra. Melissa Mehrotra, president of Wellkasa, will take on the role of CEO at Peak + Valley. The acquisition gives Wellkasa access to retail channels and extends its array of supplements.
“Peak + Valley is a natural extension of Wellkasa’s mission to deliver evidence-based support for chronic conditions,” says board director Sumit Mehrotra in a statement. Melissa Mehrotra says Wellkasa is building “a supplement company which gives mass access to lifestyle medicine education and professional-grade supplements,” and it’s looking for more assets to add to its portfolio.
Peak + Valley is available at around 4,000 retail doors, including Whole Foods Market, Kroger and PCC Community Markets, and retail represents roughly 95% of its sales. It’s also on Amazon. Joseph says there are no plans to change Peak + Valley’s distribution.
A public benefit company established in 2021, Wellkasa’s products are sold through its website and Amazon. Its flagship offering is Migra-Well, a three-product collection formulated in-house to support brain and nerve health, improve sleep quality and reduce inflammation for people with migraines and related neurological challenges. The products—Migra-Well AM, Migra-Well PM and QWell—are priced at $39.99 each.
On Melissa Mehrotra’s LinkedIn account, she discloses Wellkasa’s sales were up 75% last year versus the year before. Her experiences with migraines were formative in the creation of Wellkasa’s products.
Joseph’s personal experiences were integral to the creation of Peak + Valley, too. While working three jobs—Joseph, who has an undergraduate degree in neuroscience from The Johns Hopkins University, was a research fellow at UCSF, research assistant at UC Berkeley and aide to a woman with cerebral palsy—she battled intense stress and eczema. Hunting for solutions, she discovered adaptogens, a class of herbs and mushrooms like reishi and ashwagandha that may help the body cope with stress.
Joseph introduced Peak + Valley in 2019 originally as Pretty Mushroom with powder blends priced at $38. Prior to its deal with Wellkasa, Peak + Valley was awarded over $200,000 in grants, secured three loans amounting to $150,000 from Daintree Capital, a specialist in issuing working capital loans to underrepresented early-stage founders, and a total of $100,000 in loans from family. Once Peak + Valley began to scale, Joseph tapped a purchase order financing firm to finance over $150,000 in inventory.
Joseph had been searching for a buyer for Peak + Valley for about eight months when Wellkasa, on the hunt for acquisition targets, approached her. For future acquisition targets, Melissa Mehrotra says the Phoenix-based company is interested in brands in the brain health, longevity, women’s health and metabolic support categories and a Good Manufacturing Practices-certified supplement manufacturer, ideally in Arizona or Southern California.
According to financial information resource Crunchbase, Wellkasa raised a $775,000 pre-seed round at a $5 million valuation in June 2022. Preceding Wellkasa, Sumit Mehrotra was a business consultant for private equity firm KKR and group president at CIRCOR International, a provider of products and services for the industrial, aerospace and defense markets. Outside of Wellkasa, he’s founding partner at Ignova Ventures, a company focused on acquiring, modernizing and scaling American manufacturing in the aerospace, industrial and defense fields.
Joseph isn’t done with entrepreneurial pursuits. On her LinkedIn account, she says her next venture is developing “tools that empower people to take control of their personal data and digital privacy.”
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