5 on Funding with Lauren Picasso, Founder and CEO of Cure Hydration

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About Cure Hydration

Company Description: Cure is a VC-backed functional beverage brand based in New York City. Our hydrating electrolyte mix is based on the gold standard of rehydration. Known as Oral Rehydration Solution, it’s a perfectly balanced formula developed by the World Health Organization that can hydrate as effectively as an IV drip. One pack of Cure has 4x the electrolytes of a sports drink but no added sugar or other junk. Made with coconut water and pink Himalayan salt, Cure is designed to help you recover adequately from everyday life: exercise, travel, late nights, or illness. 

Industry: Food & beverage

Amount Raised: $5.6m Series A

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding: Growing the company, product lines, and analytics muscle

1. Growing the team

"We made three new hires on our team, so we're now at 9 full-time employees including our new CMO, Laura Kendrick."

2. Inventory and marketing support for new launches

"We’ve expanded our distribution in a really big way this year. We went from 5,000 stores to 13,000 stores in a year and have onboarded a lot of really big new partners like Sprouts, Albertsons, and Kroger. So we'll be using a lot of that funding to support the inventory and marketing around those launches."

3. New product development

"We’ll be extending our hydration line with new flavors as well as expanding into other functional categories."

4. Data software to understand competitors 

"Now that we're expanding our distribution, we want to make sure that we have really good data on our in-store velocities. So onboarding partners like SPINS, for example, can provide us that really great competitive data to see how we're performing relative to our peers within retail."

5. Marketing analytics

"We’re also looking into new analytics for our e-commerce sites as well — onboarding partners that can help us really dive into our marketing analytics to see what's working. Now that we are really spending on every major channel online, we need to understand our attribution and analytics around those different campaigns."

About the founder: Lauren Picasso is the founder and CEO of Cure Hydration, a hydrating electrolyte drink mix sold in 13,000 retail stores nationwide. Prior to Cure, she was an early employee at Jet.com, an e-commerce company that raised $570M in funding and was acquired by Walmart for $3.3B in 2016. As Director of Marketing at Jet, Lauren worked across a variety of online and offline marketing channels helping to scale the company to over 10 million customers. She was also an early employee of Rent the Runway and has worked for Google, Bloomingdale’s, and Ralph Lauren. Lauren received her MBA from Harvard Business School and BA from the University of Pennsylvania.