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Three years ago, Mila debuted her smart air purifier on Kickstarter. The company has created an air purifier with a variety of filters for the use case (and price point) that customers are interested in, along with an impressive collection built into the device itself. Today, the San Francisco-based company announced the closing of a $10 million Series A to clear the bad guys from the air for more people.
The company’s seed round was led by none other than Electrolux. Mila said it was Electrolux’s first start-up investment. Mila’s $10 million Series A was led by returning partner Cercano Management (the former venture arm of the late Paul Allen’s investment firm) and “an unknown global consumer goods brand.” The company said it will use the funds to hire, expand operations, expand its product portfolio and meet its ultimate goal of meeting global indoor air quality needs. The company also plans to develop a smart dehumidifier called Mila Halo.
The company has raised $10 million in an all-equity deal of $52 million, the company told me. The new estimates show a 3x price increase on the seed over the past year, he said.
We are on the cusp of a great ‘air revival’ as the quality of the air we breathe becomes increasingly important to families. But they return to provide little insight into whether the product families are working properly. With Milla, families can finally control and monitor their indoor air quality effortlessly,” said Grant Prigge, CEO and co-founder of Milla, in an interview with TechCrunch. “This investment
It allows us to meet growing demand as we continue to build beautiful and elegant experiences that improve the health of our homes.
The company is operating in a highly competitive market – not that there is a shortage of air purifiers – but the company’s smart, stylish design and ability to use different filters as needed make it unique. from the competitors. The application is very advanced, reporting particulate matter (PM1, PM2.5, PM10), humidity, temperature, volatile compounds (TVOC), CO.2 and CO. The purifier uses this information to intelligently wash the air – running it slowly if you really don’t need the fans, or running full blast if you need to scrub nasties from the air.
Mila has seven very funny named filters, all with slightly different features depending on what their customers want. Image Credits: Milla
We spoke to the company’s CEO and founder, Grant Prigge, to learn more. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
TC: Who are the lead investors, and what has it been like working with them so far?
Grant Prigge: With angel funding from friends, Mila went from a small project to become the first institutional investor in Electrolux, one of the world’s largest appliance manufacturers. Mila was Electrolux’s first venture capital investment in the company’s 100 years of existence.
Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital led the second round of Milan’s Vulcan Capital, the largest air purifier startup in crowdfunding history, after taking pre-orders of more than $1.5 million. Our Series A was led by Cercano Management, a Vulcan Capital Ventures spinoff, and one of the largest consumer goods manufacturers in the world.
Many people caution us against working with large corporate investors, but they are the best partners we could ask for, providing thoughtful feedback and support along the way. With the support of Electrolux, we have been able to punch well above our weight, especially when trying to navigate the supply chain challenges of the past few years. And with our new investor, we’ll see the same synergy in marketing and branding as we bring Milan into millions of homes around the world.
What is the purpose of fundraising? What does the money unlock?
This fundraiser will allow us to expand our team and meet the growing demand for Mila’s award-winning air purifier. In addition, it allows us to expand our product portfolio with additives that work to improve the health of our home and indoor environment. In the new year, we’re incredibly excited to release Mila Halo, the first humidifier of its kind to use tap water, thanks to Halo’s proprietary water filtration system. Halo was the recipient of a 2022 CES Innovation Award.
It is the integration of a growing portfolio of hardware solutions with air quality control systems that are becoming increasingly intelligent. We believe Mila will be the home health operating system of the future.
What is the long term view?
Our mission is to give back to every family. Air strike To shape the healthy home of the future. The quality of the air we breathe is recognized as the greatest environmental threat to human health today. Around the world, dirty air is behind 7 million premature deaths a year – more than AIDS, diabetes and traffic accidents combined.
These past two years have only highlighted how much we know about the air we breathe. Consumers are becoming more aware of how critical their home environment is to their health—they just don’t have the tools to do something about it. Indeed, 91% of consumers say they now understand how air quality affects their health, but 69% say they don’t know what to do about it.
Mila wants to solve that. Indoor air quality (IAQ) is a $16 billion market to disrupt. We aim to be the premier brand by making every home a healthy breathing space.
What is the Mila Cares program, and why do they offer free cleaners?
One of the things that drove us through the first Kickstarter campaign was the letters we got from our customers asking who they would buy their miles from. Couples shopped for allergy sufferers, girlfriends shopped to save a relationship between a cat and a boyfriend, dads shopped for their young children with asthma and autoimmune disease. These thoughtful notes and stories have inspired and humbled us, and made it clear that people buy our products for their loved ones, and we promise to take that responsibility seriously in everything we do. He reinforced that compassion and care should always be the core pillar of our brand (hence the name “Mila Cares”).
One way we do this is through the Milla Cares program. Any customer can nominate someone who needs fresh air, and any Mila team member can provide a Mila Cares package. The only requirement is to somehow touch them. Sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. The nominee receives a personal letter from us, almost always containing a Mila Cares package containing Mila Air Purifier.
To date, we have given out over 100 Mila Cares packages, and it allows us to celebrate the breath of fresh air we deserve in the communities we have the opportunity to be a part of in a meaningful way.
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