On August 24, 2026, private equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners announced a strategic partnership with Rael, the Los Angeles-based women's wellness brand built around what it calls "holistic cycle care." Terms were not disclosed. BeautyMatter reports that Rael had raised $59 million since its 2017 founding prior to this investment, and that the company expected full-year 2025 revenue of $125 million to $150 million — a range that puts Rael among the largest independent brands in the category and well past the point where a growth round is about survival rather than acceleration.

Why It Matters

This is what category legitimacy looks like on a balance sheet. Rael did not raise a defensive round or take a strategic check from a legacy CPG conglomerate looking to acquire relevance — it took growth capital from a mainstream PE firm on the strength of nine-figure revenue and mass-market distribution. Pair it with Essity's $284 million acquisition of Kenvue's Brazilian feminine care portfolio four days earlier, and the message to founders in intimate wellness is that the exit landscape now has two credible paths: strategic sale to an incumbent, or PE-backed scale-up. The Replogle appointment tightens the read considerably — chairs with his résumé are hired to build companies that get bought. For the wider sexual wellness sector, the relevant lesson is distribution: Rael's 40,000 doors were the diligence story, not its brand voice. Shelf space is still the moat.

Rael's distribution is the asset TowerBrook is buying. The brand is stocked in more than 40,000 retail doors across the US and Korea, including Target, Walmart, Ulta Beauty, CVS, and Walgreens, plus Olive Young in Korea. Founded by three Korean American women, the company built its product architecture around the four phases of the menstrual cycle, spanning period care, skincare, and hormonal wellness supplements — a merchandising logic that lets a single brand occupy shelf space in three different aisles of the same drugstore. Headquartered in Los Angeles with a Seoul office, it has run an omnichannel operation in both markets from early on.

Alongside the investment, Rael appointed John Replogle — former CEO of Burt's Bees and Seventh Generation — as Chair of the Board. That is a specific and legible signal about intent. Replogle's track record is scaling mission-led consumer brands through mass retail and into strategic exits; Burt's Bees sold to Clorox, Seventh Generation to Unilever. "We started Rael because we believed women deserved better choices in period care, and that belief led us to pioneer holistic cycle care," said CEO and co-founder Yanghee Paik. TowerBrook Managing Director Michael Recht framed it as building on the firm's "experience scaling emerging brands through periods of transformational growth."

TowerBrook itself is a generalist with real healthcare and consumer depth — co-headquartered in New York and London, it has invested in more than 125 companies since 2000 across private equity, structured opportunities, growth and impact, and strategic partnerships. Its arrival in intimate care follows a broader pattern in the segment: institutional capital that once treated menstrual and sexual wellness as an untouchable category is now underwriting it as ordinary consumer packaged goods.

Sources

Update — 2026-08-26

{Initial entry — story first created.}