Day: February 9, 2021

Beam, the CBD Wellness Brand, Raises $5 Million in Series A Funding – WWD

3 weeks ago

Beam, the Boston-based CBD wellness brand founded by former athletes Matt Lombardi and Kevin Moran, has completed a $5 million series A funding round led by C2 Ventures.

The investment, which brings its total investment to $12 million, will be used for operations, infrastructure, marketing efforts and to expand Elevate, a hydration vertical for the company that launches on Feb. 9.

Lombardi, a former hockey player, and Moran, a former baseball player, launched the direct-to-consumer company in 2018 with topicals to be applied for pain relief. Today, Beam offers powders, oils and capsules to help with sleep, recovery and balance, and the hydration products are their first CBD-free products for $35 and a 30-serving pack for $59.

C2 Ventures has been an investor of Beam since the company’s seed round in 2019 that was led by Obvious Ventures. New investors Litani Ventures, Carter Comstock and The Yard Ventures join a number of existing investors that includes athletes Danica Patrick, Kevin Hayes, Brooks Laich and Baker Mayfield’s family’s private equity firm Camwood Capital.

“We couldn’t find anything in the space that worked,” said Moran. “We started talking to other athletes who didn’t know what to use to recover.”

The cofounders looked

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Second Life Podcast: An Interview With Heather Andersen

3 weeks ago

If you’ve ever been to a Pilates class, there’s something that usually sticks out about the instructor: the elegant, graceful steps reminiscent of a prima ballerina. And that’s because many Pilates and new-wave fitness instructors are often retired dancers. New York Pilates founder and 2019 Estée Lauder partner, Heather Andersen, knows the story better than most: After a couple years of dancing in professional ballets in New York and Portland, a recurring ankle injury led her to reformer-based exercising, where she eventually found her calling. While living in Portland, she started working the front desk at Pilates and Gyrotonics studios in exchange for the free classes she found necessary to rehab her ankle, and it was there that an instructor told her she should teach.

“When I started doing my Pilates certification, it completely transformed my dancing by teaching me proper alignment, by creating balanced strength,” says Andersen. “I think it’s so easy to look at the shape of a movement versus understanding the biomechanics of it, and you just have so much more power when you are working in really healthy biomechanics.”

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