In this FounderX pitch, Ira Hernowitz, CEO of Kindara, presents the company’s mission, product suite, traction, and growth strategy to an audience of founders and potential investors. He explains Kindara’s purpose of giving women tools, products, and community support to manage their reproductive health, whether aiming to conceive or avoid pregnancy. The business consists of three pillars: a highly rated fertility tracking app (1.4 M total downloads, 180 k monthly active users, 5‑star ratings), the Wink basal body temperature thermometer that syncs data to the app, and an active community generating 85 k monthly comments and 47 M days of charted data. Hernowitz highlights strong organic growth (≈25 k new downloads per month, 750 k email contacts) and outlines a three‑pronged growth plan: (1) launch Wink 2.0 with a lower price and broader retail distribution, (2) transition the app to a freemium model with subscription‑based premium community features, analytics, and education, and (3) introduce Kindara DNA, a saliva‑based genetic testing service via an undisclosed sequencing partner. He announces a new COO from Prelude Fertility, lists existing investors (SOS Ventures, 500 Startups, Boston Seed, Seven Peaks), and notes the current SeedInvest Reg A fundraising round. The pitch concludes with a call for investment to expand the community and shift to recurring revenue, emphasizing that VCs favor subscription models.
Chapters
Good morning, everybody. I'm Ira Hurnowitz. I'm the CEO of Kindara. We did come through Founder Institute with our founder, and for all of you founders in the room, I will tell you I am blown away at what you do every day in starting a company. This is my first real entrepreneurial company. I've worked in companies— I never worked in a company in the last up until the last year that had less than $500 million of free cash flow. So imagine when I walk into Kindara and we have a couple weeks of cash there. So anyway, you guys are awesome. So you guys are going to watch me pitch, but then I want you to watch the screen. So you're going to— and this is like super— I didn't even know we were pitching. I thought it was like kind of just a presentation. But hey, Sharks, let me share with you a little bit about Kindara. But it's better if I don't talk about it. Let me have some of my users talk about it.
I knew next to nothing about fertility awareness methods. This is not stuff that we grew up talking to each other about. This isn't, you know, sort of your mother's fertility awareness. It's changed my life and impacted my life in a way that I would never guess anything else would do.
So, click the next slide. So those are some of our users, and Kindara started in 2012. We have a really cool mission. And what we try to do is we try to give women the tools and the products and the support they need to take ownership of their own reproductive health. And hopefully that'll be to meet their fertility goals, whether it's trying to conceive or trying not to conceive. You click to the next slide. Our business is really made up, and it's pivoted since its beginning. Our business is made up of really 3 key aspects. We have an app, which I'll talk to you a little bit about in a minute, if you could click. Yeah, so we have a fantastic app. It's been downloaded, as Ryan mentioned before, over 1.4 million times since inception. We have over 180,000 monthly active users right now, and that number is growing. And we're actually one of the best-reviewed apps in the App Store, either in iOS or Android. We have over 6,000 ratings, all averaging 5 stars. So women love our app. We also then have Wink. Click, please. Wink is our connected device. So it is our— if you guys could click. Thanks. So this is our Wink. This is a basal body temperature thermometer. So the Wink app basically works with two key indicators. And it's a thermometer like this. And you could see it's winking at you when you open it up. And the great part about it is that when you take your temperature in the morning, It's super fast. It's 30 seconds. And then it feeds the data directly into the app, which is the most important part. But then the third part, if you could click, is our community. We have an incredible community of women that are just spectacular. 85,000 monthly comments on their charts, on each other's charts. And what's also awesome about our business, and we talk about building a community, we have 47 million days of data from women that are charting either to conceive or not to conceive. Click the slide, please. The thing we're most excited about as we move forward, as we reach into our bag to do some investment, is the community and the immense opportunity that we have. So in building this community, we've got an app that is so well received. We get about 25,000 new downloads every month, and we do that completely organically. So we're the number 1 or number 2 rated app in the App Store for this space. Over 47 million days of data. We have 750,000 emails that we could market to ultimately. Like I said, 85,000 posts, and it's a great app. But again, it's better if the women talk about the community than me, so I'm gonna let them tell you a little bit about it.
Most personal information, and they're willing to help you and figure out what's going on. I am pretty much addicted to the community in general.
Click, please. We love women that are addicted to the community, which is great. Our go-forward strategy and the reason we're raising money is to follow 3 key areas of growth. Improvement and growth in connected devices, recurring revenue through subscriptions, which we're going to get to, and then additional fee-based services. So if you guys could click, we'll go through each of them really quickly. We are actually gonna take this wonderful little device and we're gonna improve it. We have a Wink 2.0 in design. We're gonna lower the retail from $129 to $79. We're gonna expand distribution potentially into major mass market retailers across the world. That's number one. Number two, ah, nice cue, is we are redoing our app. So if for any of you, and by the way, investing is kind of a bro thing. And there are a lot of women that know what we're talking about here. It's always funny when I'm standing up talking about cervical fluid and basal body temperature. But this is kind of how our app works. We're making some amazing changes to it, all improvements to get to a freemium model where we could charge subscriptions. The big change that we're making is we're making substantial beneficial changes to the community. Because we want people to actually pay us a subscription. So we're going to give them better ability to communicate with one another, better analytics, better charting, more educational tools. So kind of giving them a plus on what they've already gotten. The third part of it, which we're so excited about, is— and this is— we're announcing it here today— is we are about to launch a new product because of our community called Kindara DNA. And we have an outstanding partner that we can't talk about yet, but we have a DNA sequencing partner. So what we're going to be able to do is offer a service for women where they'll be able to give us a swab of their saliva and we're going to help them on their fertility journey, give them great insights into their personal health. So these are all kind of the big three of where we're going and which is why we're so desperate to get new investment and why we're so happy to be partnering with SeedInvest. With Reg A. As, as, you know, Ryan mentioned, it's a great service for us because we have such a strong and active user base. Next slide. The management team, you see my ugly face, but then more importantly, we've just brought on a new COO, a newcomer who comes out of the fertility industry. She was at Prelude Fertility Sighting Company. She was a VP of Core Blood Registry. So I'm excited to have her with me. And then the next slide. Is if you come in and you decide to invest, you've got some great investment partners already there. SOS Ventures, 500 Startups, Boston Seed are some of the bigger people. Seven Peaks up in Bend, for those people who are looking for ecosystems outside of the Valley, I know Bend is a growing community. Next slide. Again, really simply, we're trying to get you guys to help us expand the community. We've got more custom data, we've got more user experiences and better user experiences, and then the last slide is We're going to a monthly subscription model. And I will tell you that VCs love recurring revenue, and we're excited to go there. And we've already polled our users, and they're really excited about using it with us too. So click next slide. And that's my, like, super abbreviated elevator 5-minute pitch.
