Investment Notes: Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus has announced its Series A fundraising, led by Woolworths’ venture arm, W23. We were thrilled to invest into the round, having led the company’s pre-seed round in January 2019, and seed round in October 2019.

This is a hugely exciting milestone for cofounders, Tim Doyle, Charlie Gearside, Benny Kleist, and  Alexey Mitko, and the whole team at Eucalyptus.

Rise & Rise

The company launched its first product - Pilot - a medical advisor for a generation of young men that are poorly served by the medical community in July 2019.

In January this year, Eucalyptus launched its second brand, Kin Fertility, to empower women with the information, products and access to health care they need to take control of their fertility. Their first product is an online subscription service for the contraceptive pill.

Eucalyptus is one of the fastest growing companies we’ve ever funded.

Telemedicine and Tailwinds

Eucalyptus was one of the select companies in the Blackbird portfolio that saw an acceleration in growth as a result of COVID-19. As people’s ability and desire to see a doctor in-person declined, we saw more people come to Pilot & Kin to seek treatment for premature ejaculation, hair loss, and erectile dysfunction (Pilot), and contraception (Kin).

While telemedicine will see strong growth this year, it’s Eucalyptus’ view that many people coming to their first virtual appointment will be disappointed by inconsistent experiences with the doctor, and the technology. Where Eucalyptus differentiates is on its obsession with customer experience (CX). The tangible proof of Eucalyptus’ CX is in their wonderful reviews.

The company’s plan is to continue building new telehealth offerings around specific conditions, and then delivering exceptional customer experience to build people’s trust and loyalty. With that trust and loyalty comes the opportunity to build a suite of health services for Eucalyptus customers.

There are very few healthcare brands that attract love and devotion. Most customers buy the ingredient and not the brand. We think Eucalyptus can change this.

‍Five strands to make the rope

Eucalyptus is built on a set of five distinct insights:

1. There is an opportunity to create differentiated customer experience (CX) in healthcare through technology.
2. This technology can be utilised across a variety of areas of care, creating the opportunity for specialised brands.
3. Having multiple brands allows you to invest the best growth opportunities at any given time.
4. A single great creative team in-house can power multiple brands, and do it more efficiently than either a single brand or agency. This is the secret to reducing CAC over time.
5. Unlocking and attracting under-utilised talent gives you the ability to do 1-4 especially well.

Through Eucalyptus' reviews, you can see the company’s ability to deliver on its differentiated CX promise.

The company’s ability to launch and grow Kin in ¼ of the time it took to grow Pilot is evidence of the efficiency of the shared infrastructure, and gives rise to future opportunities to be built on top of that platform.

Eucalyptus’ ability to move ad dollars fluidly between Kin and Pilot on an hourly basis, and across any channel that’s working (TV, radio, Facebook, Instagram, and Google) has meant that over time, Eucalyptus’ cost of acquisition has come down.

By bringing all their content creation (both ads, and longform), and media buying in-house, Eucalyptus is able to control their marketing output, and improve their capacity over time.

Blackbird’s best companies tend to attract talent very quickly in the early months. The growth of the Eucalyptus team has been a joy to watch, with brilliant folks joining Eucalyptus from diverse places like the Startmate Fellowship, McKinsey, Buzzfeed, Atlassian and Rockpool. Eucalyptus is building out a deeply talented group of people in pursuit of its mission.

The superpower of doing what you say you will

Eucalyptus is one of those rare companies where the seed pitch deck predicted almost perfectly what they’d do in the following year. Since we first funded the company, they’ve proved out two brands, hired an incredible team, and shown all the signs of efficiency we hoped to see in terms of their technology and customer experience.

What holds those threads together is that Eucalyptus is ultimately a capital allocation business.

Warren Buffet built Berkshire Hathaway by not investing more in the original textile mill. There have been many cases of direct to consumer brands that kept investing in the textile mill (Casper) instead of the next brand and new business frontier. That is the essence of the Eucalyptus mission and the magic of Tim and the team.

The company’s vision for a conglomerate of healthcare brands is starting to play out, and we are thrilled to continue with them on the journey.

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BONUS: We recently launched the new Blackbird podcast - Wild Hearts - hosted by Blackbird analyst Mason Yates. Eucalyptus’ CEO Tim Doyle is the inaugural guest, so if you’re interested in learning more about him, you can subscribe here!