Alex Taylor Perelel founder and cofounder Victoria Thain Gioia built their women’s health supplement company from a bootstrap start during the pandemic into a brand that has since raised a total of $12.1 million in funding and sold almost 31 million capsules in its most recent year, according to PRNewswire and Beauty Independent. The path there started with a Hashimoto’s disease diagnosis, a pregnancy, and a decision to walk away from a senior media role.
From Media Leadership to Autoimmune Diagnosis
Taylor has described reaching a leadership position early in her career, becoming president and executive editor in chief of Clique, the media house that publishes Who What Wear, Byrdie and MyDomaine, at around the age of 29. The hours were long, she has said: arriving at around 7am and leaving at around 7pm, responding to emails through the night.
In 2016 the symptoms began. Hair loss, extreme lethargy, brain fog, inflamed fingers, rapid weight gain and a breakout of shingles. When she finally saw a doctor, the diagnosis was Hashimoto’s Disease, an autoimmune condition her physicians believed was partly a consequence of extreme stress. At the same time, she was having difficulty getting pregnant. ‘No job was worth my health,’ she has said.
She changed her diet, began a prescription medication and made a structural decision: leave Clique. She was recruited by URBN to lead its activewear brand Free People Movement, joining when she was seven months pregnant. After roughly a year there, she left to start something of her own.
Alex Taylor Perelel: From a Vitamin Drawer to a Funded Brand
The business idea came from a practical frustration. Around the time Taylor gave birth to her son, she was sorting pills from multiple bottles, trying to reconcile advice from an obstetrician, an acupuncturist and a naturopath simultaneously. She then met Gioia, whose daughter was born with a nutrition-related cleft lip. The experience had made both women acutely aware of how critical certain nutrients can be during pregnancy.
They set out to fundraise, but the pandemic arrived and, in Taylor’s words, ‘everyone’s checkbooks slammed shut.’ The pair bootstrapped instead, launching Perelel in September 2020 with five products designed for different stages of pregnancy.
Fundraising followed the launch rather than preceded it. A seed round was led by Unilever Ventures and Willow Growth, with Selva Ventures and Prelude Growth Partners participating in subsequent rounds. The $12.1 million total raised includes a $6 million Series A, according to PRNewswire, which also describes Perelel as the first and only female OB/GYN-founded vitamin company in its category. Beauty Independent reported that the brand sold almost 31 million capsules in its most recent year, a figure that reflects how quickly the product range has scaled since that five-SKU launch.
The range has since extended beyond prenatal support to cover perimenopause and IVF journeys. The company now has an office in Los Angeles and a full team.
Managing Stress as a Founder With a Health History
Taylor has been direct about the tension between ambition and the autoimmune condition that prompted her original exit from media. She meditates almost daily, goes to bed at 8pm after putting her children down, and has moved from self-improvement reading to fiction, which she says has brought her more relief. She has also started using a Brick phone lock to prevent herself from multitasking on Slack during bath time with her children, identifying that habit as a primary source of stress.
Her partner’s work in the film industry has taken him away from home for months at a time, and in the early years of the business she relied on family nearby in Los Angeles, including her mother and mother-in-law, rather than a full-time nanny she says she could not yet afford.
The $6 million Series A, reported by PRNewswire, positions Perelel for further expansion at a point when the women’s health supplement category is drawing growing institutional interest. The next phase for the brand, Taylor has indicated, is continuing to broaden coverage across reproductive life stages beyond pregnancy itself.