Welcome to CPGD’s newsletter for investors.

We started this newsletter because hundreds of our existing 9,000+ subscribers expressed interest in investing in early stage CPG. So we started curating a Deal Flow Portal with vetted, early-access deals. As both our list of investors and deals grew, we decided to expand our offering into a totally separate newsletter.

Each newsletter will feature:

And to introduce myself: hi, 👋 I’m Lucy. I’ve been leading Partnerships at CPGD and and will be curating these founder stories along with my partner Erica. I attended the University of Chicago and am currently an MBA student at Wharton.

Liked our spotlights? Check out our Deal Flow Portal (password = betterforyou) for a full list of vetted CPG startups currently raising! We refresh this portal every month with new brands.

Highlighting amazing Founders who are raising right now…

Highlighting amazing Founders who are raising right now…

Bumpin’ Blends

Subscription-based, customized, pre-blended, frozen smoothie cubes delivered to your door

Seed: $1M SAFE

Founder background: Lisa Mastela is the founder of Bumpin’ Blends. She is a registered dietitian with a Masters in Nutrition and Public Health. She was constantly recommending smoothies to her patients and clients to help them "biohack" their body (before biohacking was the buzzword it is now!), making a concoction of natural foods to boost health and wellness in mood, focus, sleep, stress, and even sex drive. However, many found that making an effective functional smoothie at home was time consuming, messy, expensive, and never tasted quite right. Therefore, I was inspired to find a different solution.

What was the inspiration behind Bumpin’ Blends? I was always entrepreneurial and starting side hustles for fun, even in high school. After getting my Masters, I was an early hire at a $90M funded start-up and saw firsthand what not to do while growing a company. So while on maternity leave, I decided to spend $18K of my own savings building Bumpin Blends. By the time maternity leave was over, Bumpin Blends had taken off!

What does your company do or what problem does it aim to solve? When it comes to smoothies you have two options: 1) buy a smoothie, opting for either a $10 sugar bomb or a $20+ "functional" healthier option; or 2) make a smoothie at home, spending too much on expensive powders, supplements, and other fresh supplies, making a huge mess, and taking up 30+ minutes trying to make it perfect only for it to end up falling short on taste. With Bumpin Blends, you just mix the cubes with water or milk, and you have a perfect dietitian-designed functional smoothie to support a specific need in seconds with no mess and no waste. Each flavor supports different functions such as focus, stress, mood, energy, sex drive, sleep, hydration, skin, bloating, and more, and they all taste delicious. We come in different flavors such as Banana Nut, Berry Awake, Cinnamon Chai Cookie Dough, PB Cup, Thin Mint, and so many more!

Any exciting initiatives coming up? Yes! Other than a rotation in Costco last year, we have always been direct-to-consumer - sold as a subscription bundle. However, in the next 6 months we are launching in 2,000 retail stores, including Walmart, Target, and Sprouts. In addition to this rapid and explosive growth into stores, we are launching a licensed BARBIE flavor with Mattel - Barbie Strawberry Dream, which will be debuting on retail shelves in June. Our funding round is predominantly to support marketing initiatives and strategic retail growth.

Raise Details:

Curate Capital: Female - focused Consumer VC

We all saw the statistics from Pitchbook. Female founders & co-founders secured 23% of total VC funding in 2023. While that’s a record high, it’s still less than a quarter of overall investments. I spoke with Carrie Colbert from Curate Capital on she’s backing female entrepreneurs and unlocking untapped potential

What was the inspiration behind a female-focused fund? As I rose in the ranks in my career as an oil and gas executive, I found myself to be consistently the only woman in the room. I quickly realized I would eventually need to build my own table. I was fortunate to be able to do just that when I “retired” at age 38 and launched an influencer career that would amass over 82K followers on Instagram. As I connected with female-founded brands to invest in with my personal funds, I found myself dreaming of an economy where women were equally empowered through venture capital. Sadly, reality falls short. I realized the critical underrepresentation of female investors leaves promising women-led businesses chronically underfunded. But the tide is turning, in part due to the venture capital fund we formed in 2021: Curate Capital. Since then, we’ve raised $15M for female founders in our first fund raise alone.

Can you share some insights into unique challenges female entrepreneurs face and how your fund seeks to support them? Research has shown that female entrepreneurs are less likely to get VC funding compared to their male counterparts, hindering their ability to grow and reach their full potential. But while women-led businesses are chronically underfunded, they are also overperforming, so that creates an opportunity to earn outsized returns. At Curate Capital, I am super proud that we have an investor base of almost 80% women - a statistic that is unheard of in this industry.   

Female founders also face challenges in building a strong support network and getting access to mentors and advisors. At Curate Capital, we invest in people just as much as we do in the business itself. That’s just the nature of early-stage investing. So, we are interested in women of high character who have a strong vision and vantage point for their business but are also willing to take feedback and input. With my experience empowering women, I have created a community of female-owned businesses that are taking the leap to expand their company and build a bigger and broader audience. After all, merely providing capital isn’t enough to address the multifaceted challenges women entrepreneurs encounter. Thus, our thesis has expanded to encompass not only financial investment but also strategic support, mentorship, and networking opportunities tailored specifically to the needs of women in business.

Any exciting initiatives coming up this year / anything else you'd like our readers to know! We’re very close to launching our second fund in the coming months, which will also come with some exciting new developments. More importantly, we continue to spread our mission of accelerating the success of businesses by women, for women. We have some exciting community events and investment opportunities coming up in 2024!

Portfolio Highlights: Reach out to Lara Larson for further details on Curate’s portfolio companies and any upcoming raises

Deux: Vegan and gluten-free cookie dough brand that enhances their delicious treats with vitamins, collagen, and protein. They have recently expanded into donut holes which you can now find at any Sprouts location. We love seeing Deux drop new flavors and collab with other brands.

Red Clay: While out for dinner a few years ago, founder Molly Fienning encountered one of Charleston’s culinary urban legends: a hot sauce so good that patrons were stealing right off the restaurant table. She was amused by the sauce’s lore and added a few dashes to her meal. The Fresno-based sauce was full of flavor, subtle heat and complemented every bite. Suddenly, Molly had become a hot sauce person. The newly converted hot sauce fanatic begged Chef Geoff Rhyne to visit her table and they traded stories about food, flavor and family. Within a year, they developed Red Clay and partnered to bring Geoff’s sauce to tables across the country – no subversive dinner thievery required.

Live Tinted: Deepica Mutyala is a founder who started as a creator in the beauty space and then turned her skills into an incredible business. Her company Live Tinted is a manufacturer of beauty products that fit your personalized hue and specific preferences. The company is focused on tinted makeup that enhances your natural beauty and skin tones, and enables consumers to embrace their authenticity. Live Tinted has had great success in Target and we are excited to be amongst their largest investors. 

Glamhive: Glamhive is the first end-to-end, online platform for providing personalized styling services. Glamhive has created a seamless solution that enables all aspects related to styling, from customer communication to payments, and style delivery. Stylists and makeup artists can finally focus on what they do best: providing advice, inspiration, and wardrobe/beauty product curation to their clients. 

And if you’d like an intro to the founders, feel free to reach out ([email protected])!

-Lucy