Unbound, a sexual wellness startup for women, recently raised $2.7 million from Founders Fund, Slow Ventures, Arena Ventures, SoGal Ventures and others. Founded by Polly Rodriguez of Women of SexTech, Unbound aims to empower women to own their sexuality.
“Raising money is always hard but it took an exceptional amount of resilience,” Rodriguez said.
Unbound’s bread and butter is three-fold: content related to sexual health, wellness and pleasure, individual sex toy products and a quarterly box of curated products. Unbound started as a third-party seller for sex products like vibrators and lubricant. In recent months, it’s been developing and selling its own in-house products. Down the road, the goal is to completely shift away from the third-party reselling business.
“The transition from selling third-party to predominantly your own products isn’t always the smoothest,” she said. “In the next year, ideally, most things will be made in house.”
Currently, the bulk of what’s sold on Unbound are vibrators. The company also sells bundled items, like a strap-on box, g-spot box, a kink box and menopause box. Unbound expects to do around $2 million in sales by the end of this year.
At some point, Unbound will also expand into brick-and-mortar to be more experience-driven. Rodriguez envisions Unbound becoming something like Planned Parenthood 2.0, where people can get mammograms, pap smears and other “things women dread.”
“Female sexual health and wellness can become this thing we don’t dread,” she said.
Rodriguez decided to start the company after her battle with cancer and radiation-induced menopause. During that time, she said wanted to make sure she was taking ownership over her body and sexuality.
But the shopping experience for lubricant “mortified” her, she said. “It stuck with me as a terrible experience.”
In addition to empowering women and solving problems that are specific to them, Rodriguez wants to educate the public around women’s health and sex.
“People often assume that anything adult is all the same thing,” Rodriguez said. “Anything from hardcore pornography to very simple lubricants. One of the things our company and women of SexTech seek to achieve is to really provide more categorization,” Rodriguez said. “And it helps to decrease the stigmas and taboos associated with sexual health and wellness.”