One year after the FTC blocked from Harry from being acquired by Edgewell Personal Care, the direct-to-consumer shaver startup has raised $155 million in Series E funding to give a valuation of $1.7 billion. Now, months later, Harry’s filed paperwork indicates that he has raised another nine-figure cash tranche.
SEC filings show that Harry’s raised $139.9 million in a new funding event. The same file listed the co-founders alongside Zola co-founder Shan-Lyn Ma, Addition Capital founder Lee Fixel, Campbell Soup Co. CEO, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Lipkin and Chief Advisor Jack Sarno.
Harry’s, through a spokesperson, said: “We are not commenting at this time.”
The new funding gives the company just over $791 million in known total funding since the company was founded in 2013, according to Crunchbase data.
From acquisition target to brand incubator
Harry’s has been quite active over the past year. It recently acquired Lumē, a direct-to-consumer brand created to help control total body odor, in an undisclosed arrangement. In early 2021, it launched its hair care line at Headquarters. In a previous interview with Ploonge, Tehmina Haider, Harry’s director of growth, spoke about the company’s focus on acquiring businesses with “proven fit for the product and love for the consumer.”
“The idea about M&A for Harry’s is that we want to be a multi-category CPG company and build a family of CPG brands,” she said. “We want to create more and better things for consumers, and we look for brands that are aligned with that mission, positioned so that we can be useful and that address unmet needs.”
Whether or not this is a plan to help it break into public markets is unclear, but it helps that the late-stage DTC company has some precedents to watch out for.
Casper, who recently left public markets after his rocky debut, has taught investors and the public about the limits of DTC companies, while Warby Parker’s direct listing has given the same group some hope.
As our own Alex Wilhelm puts it, DTC companies that want to go public need to “grow fast enough that losses seem secondary, leading to stock price appreciation and the ability to self-finance growth as needed” or find a way to cut losses if growth slows. In other words, it might not show up as SaaS growth, but it might show up as value growth.
Regardless of whether to go the public market path or not, Harry’s goal from birth was to reach the holders of the global shaving market, which it must reach. $22.5 billion by 2030.