A year after the FTC blocked Harry’s from getting acquired by Edgewell Personal Care, the direct-to-consumer razor startup raised $155 million in Series E financing to give it a $1.7 billion valuation. Now, months later, Harry’s filed paperwork indicating that it has raised another nine-figure cash tranche.
SEC filings show that Harry’s has raised $139.9 million in a new financing event. The same filing listed the co-founders alongside Zola’s co-founder Shan-Lyn Ma, Addition Capital founder Lee Fixel, Campbell Soup Co. CEO Mark Clouse, politician Helena Foulkes, Zoom chief diversity officer Damien Hooper-Campbell, as well as Harry’s chief financial officer Jeff Lipkin and chief counsel Jack Sarno.
Harry’s, through a spokesperson, said, “we are not commenting at this moment.”
The new funding gives the company just over $791 million in total known 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 all-over body odor, in an undisclosed deal. Early in 2021, it launched its Headquarters hair care line. In a previous interview with TechCrunch, Tehmina Haider, Harry’s chief growth officer, spoke to the company’s focus on acquiring businesses with “demonstrated product fit and consumer love.”
“The idea about M&A for Harry’s is 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 are looking for brands aligned with that mission, are positioned in a way we can be helpful and are brands serving unmet needs.”
Whether or not this is a plan to help it eventually enter the public markets is unclear, but it does help that the late-stage DTC company has some precedent to look to.
Casper, which recently left the public markets after its rocky debut, taught investors and the public about the limits of DTC companies, while Warby Parker’s direct listing gave the same cohort some hope.
As our own Alex Wilhelm puts it, DTC companies that want to go public either need to “grow quickly enough that losses feel secondary, leading to share-price appreciation and the ability to self-fund growth as needed” or find a way to trim losses if growth slows. In other words, it may not appear as SaaS growth, but it could appear as value growth.
Regardless of if it goes down the public market path or not, Harry’s goal since birth was to target incumbents in the global shave market, which is forecasted to reach $22.5 billion by 2030.
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