How Squared Circles is hoping to build the next generation of food & wellness brands

Venture studio Squared Circles has lofty plans to launch the next big health, wellness and food products. The project first began a little over three years ago when Lukas Derksen, who hailed from the creative firm Sid Lee, began angel investing in brands alongside entrepreneurs Alexander Gilkes and Osman Khan. One of its early investments was in the hair wellness brand Nutrafol. They decided to formalize the program into an incubation studio. Over the years, however, Squared Circles decided to take a more hands-on approach -- instead of acting as an incubator and investor for external brands, the studio is now focused on launching and scaling its own businesses. With that, the company just raised a $40 million Series A led by L Catterton. "The pitch to the partners that we're building with in the future is: OK, how do we actually build these things all the way to launch -- and even Series A -- without actually giving up necessarily any more of the cap table people?" said co-founder Derksen. He joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about Squared Circle's growth so far. Currently, Squared Circles has incubated two brands -- cooking oil startup Algae Cooking and skin care company Magic Molecule. It has plans to launch other brands too in spaces like "nutritious food products tailored to the GLP-1 generation" and "delivering functional medicine to children in tasty alternatives," according to its website. According to Derksen, all of these ideas come from data. "We start very much from a consumer insight place -- and that's something that we strive for every single time," he said. The focus now is to continue launching new products and getting them ready to market as quickly as possible. Though VC funding isn't as plentiful as it was a few years ago, Derksen said there is still an appetite for certain areas. "The two categories that have been outspending on disproportionately are health and wellness and food and beverage," he said.