Tech
Investors once shied away from funding sex-tech, but now they’re ‘gung-ho.’ Here’s the pitch deck sexual-wellness startup Dame used to win over VCs and raise $7 million.
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- Once a crowdfunding darling, sexual wellness startup Dame has now raised a $7 million Series A.
- The 8-year-old startup believes that women’s sexual wellness is key to their overall health.
- Here’s the pitch deck Dame used to raise funding from investors like Amboy Street Ventures.
One startup linked the importance of sexual pleasure to overall health and well-being in order to secure $7 million in fresh funding from VCs.
Dame just raised a $7 million Series A funding round led by Amboy Street Ventures. Listen Ventures, Flybridge, Echo, and Forest Road Company also participated in the round, which follows the startup’s $4 million seed round in early 2021.
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Founded in 2014, Dame is a consumer femtech startup that creates sex toys and products. The startup has gained notoriety, first, as an Indiegogo darling that broke a record for the highest-funded sex toy on the crowdfunding platform, and a Dame product back in 2016 became the first sex toy allowed on Kickstarter.
In 2019, Dame again made headlines when it sued the New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority for discriminatory advertising practices, highlighting the difficulties faced by women’s sexual health companies trying to advertise.
Dame cofounder and CEO Alexandra Fine told Insider that only recently has women’s pleasure been taken seriously in the mainstream — and by investors — as it relates to overall health and wellness.
“Sexual wellness is core to overall well-being,” she said. “It’s like sleep — you could sleep too much or get not enough at all, and it isn’t good or bad. Sex isn’t necessarily good or bad, it’s just an indicator of what it means to live a happy and fulfilling life. Sex is a part of our physical and mental well-being.”
The sexual-wellness market could reach $125.1 billion in revenue by 2026, KBV Research estimates. But sexual health startups make up a small but growing sub-sector of the $175.6 billion global digital health market, with a few that specifically focus on women’s sexual pleasure. Hims and Hers, a telemedicine company for skin care, hair loss, and sexual health was founded as male wellness company Hims in 2017 and expanded into women’s health a year later. The startup went public in a deal with a SPAC that valued it at $1.6 billion in January 2021.
Fine added that Dame was the first startup pushing women’s sexual health into the mainstream and that she’s finally starting to reap the rewards in the form of VCs slowly becoming more open to funding what was once taboo.
“We talked to some of the investors for so long, and our numbers just proceed that what was happening at Dame was sustainable,” she said. “VC opinion is slowly turning, and they just did more research and are now gung-ho about this category. I’ve seen funds who originally denied me on the basis of it being the sexual-health category, who have popped back up and are now interested in the space.”
Here’s the 16-page pitch deck Dame used to raise its $7 million Series A.
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