Perelel’s Big Raise, Topgolf’s Reset, and What Investors Really Want

Perelel Raises $27M and Shows the New Playbook for Winning in Women’s Wellness

Perelel announced a $27M growth round this week, led by Prelude Growth Partners with participation from Unilever Ventures, Willow Growth, and Selva. It’s an impressive raise in one of consumer’s most competitive categories: supplements.

What’s more impressive is how they’ve built the business.

Life-stage specificity instead of generic wellness.
Where most vitamin brands rely on catch-all formulations, Perelel built its architecture around women’s biological milestones: conception, each trimester, postpartum, and perimenopause. That segmentation creates trust, pricing power, and retention.

Clinical credibility as moat.
Doctor-founded and doctor-designed formulations set Perelel apart from the marketing-heavy brands that crowd the space.

A long, predictable customer lifecycle.
Done well, the prenatal → postpartum → hormone-health journey spans years, not months. That shows up in LTV.

Disciplined omnichannel expansion.
Instead of rushing into retail, Perelel validated retention and unit economics first — then expanded into Target, Whole Foods, and prestige channels.

In a category where many brands plateau early, Perelel is showing what thoughtful category design actually looks like.

Function Health Raises $298M at a $2.5B Valuation, One of the Fastest-Growing Consumer Brands

Function Health’s $298M raise (at a $2.5B valuation) positions it as one of the most important emerging companies in consumer health.

The model:
A membership that gives users 100+ biomarker labs twice per year, with all health data integrated into an AI-driven “Medical Intelligence” platform.

The metric that stands out:
Function reports “hundreds of thousands” of members. Even if that means ~250,000 members paying ~$499 annually, revenue could already exceed $125M for a business launched in 2022.

Why investors are leaning in:

Recurring revenue in a category that’s never had it.
Labs are typically episodic; Function makes them subscription-based.

A proprietary data advantage.
The company is building a longitudinal model trained on labs, imaging, physician notes, and multi-year member histories; an AI moat that strengthens with every test.

A platform that keeps expanding.
Labs → imaging → insights → longitudinal care. Each layer widens TAM and deepens retention.

Function is shaping up to be one of the most consequential consumer-health companies of the decade.

Topgolf Resets: Leonard Green Acquires 60% at a $1.1B Valuation

Topgolf Callaway Brands announced it will sell 60% of Topgolf + Toptracer to Leonard Green for $770M, valuing the business at ~$1.1B; roughly half the implied valuation when Callaway acquired it in 2020.

It’s a meaningful reset for one of the most ambitious experiential concepts of the 2010s.

Once fueled by hundreds of millions in private capital, Topgolf was acquired by Callaway for ~$2B with the vision of creating a vertically integrated golf ecosystem; spanning equipment, venues, and technology.

But rising venue capex, debt load, and margin pressure challenged the story. Public-market investors never embraced the “golf conglomerate” model, and MODG traded at a persistent discount.

The new structure gives Callaway deleveraging room, puts Topgolf under a specialist operator in Leonard Green, and preserves 40% ownership for future upside.

It’s a pragmatic reset for an asset that still carries meaningful consumer affinity.

🎙 Podcast Highlight: What It Takes to Raise Capital in 2025. Insights from Willow Growth’s Amanda Schutzbank

On this week’s episode of In The Money, I spoke with Amanda Schutzbank, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Willow Growth Partners, one of the most respected early-stage firms in consumer.

If you’re building a consumer brand or raising capital in 2025, this conversation is a roadmap.

We cover:

• Why fundraising looks nothing like 2021, and won’t again
• The biggest misconception founders still have about raising growth capital
• Why product → distribution → narrative fit now matters more than speed
• The traits Willow sees in founders who scale from $0 → $50M+
• How to build investor alignment that lasts multiple cycles
• Which categories feel overcrowded, and which are opening up
• Her #1 piece of advice for founders heading into 2026

It’s one of the most practical conversations we’ve had this year on what “good” looks like in the current capital environment.

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify.

That’s it for this week.
If you liked this issue, forward to a friend who obsesses over brand strategy, capital flows, or exit timing.

In the Money – following the flow of capital in consumer

P.S. We love talking to brands interested in exiting in the next 3-18 months. If you know of any brands interested in exiting, or any firms trying to help port cos manage turnarounds, we'd love to share a POV.

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