I told Mike I was passing on this one

After 26 years in this game, I have a strong preference for warm introductions.

• The last spotlight I wrote was about Muse Bio, a stem cell company I backed this spring.
• That one came from Gus Domel at Boost VC. We talked online for months and finally met in person at the Draper Summit in May.
• A trusted person vouching for a founder changes how I listen.

This one started the same way. In November 2024, Mike Quinn, a founder in my portfolio at Boost Technology (yes, another Boost), introduced me to Jas and Jo, the co-founders of Luna.

I told Mike I was passing on this one.

The first call

December 2024. Twenty-five minutes. I liked Jas immediately. Direct, honest about the hard parts, and she knew the problem from the inside.

I still did not invest.

What they are building

A teenager with a health question has two choices.

• Ask a parent. Awkward. Often they do not.
• Search TikTok or Google. The answers are unreliable, or just wrong.

Luna fills that gap. Period tracker, mood tracker, sleep, skin. And the part that makes it different: anonymous questions, answered by real experts.

A 14-year-old can ask something she would never ask her mum, and get an answer backed by medical experts. No judgment, no algorithm deciding what she sees.

Why I passed

The round in late 2024 was opportunistic, put together after a TechCrunch Battlefield appearance. The story was good but the data was thin. I wanted to watch them build for longer.

So I told Mike I was out. They kept building.

What I watched for eighteen months

Luna kept sending updates. Not desperate check-ins. Short, factual notes.

• Organic search traffic kept climbing, quarter after quarter.
• Parent downloads grew fast, and revenue followed.
• Well-known names in the UK started paying attention to them.

The direction was consistent. But what caught my attention was not the growth. It was how they were growing.

The insight that changed my mind

They figured out that the person who pays and the person who uses the app are different people.

Parents buy Luna for their teenagers. And teens whose parents buy it use the app far more, not less. The parent sees how often the app is used, not what is asked inside. So it is not about being watched. It is about someone who loves you saying: I take your health seriously.

Then they went to the US, and the picture got sharper.

• Reaching a new user cost a fraction of what it cost in the UK.
• A strong share of downloads turned into paying subscribers.
• Subscribers who paid, stayed. In consumer apps, that is rare.
• And Americans chose annual plans over monthly. The opposite of what you usually see in a brand-new market.

That last one is the signal I care about. When people pay upfront for a full year in a market you just entered, they are telling you the product is worth it.

The founders

Jas and Jo have been on this idea since Jas’s MBA, years before I met them. She likes to say she spent all her money on the degree and got Luna out of it. That is a long time to stay with something most people would have dropped.

• Jas is the one you notice first on a call. Direct, no theater, does not dress up the hard parts.
• Jo is the steady one. She carries the unglamorous side: compliance, regulators, the paperwork that keeps a company alive.
• They brought in a CTO who had already built and exited a women’s health startup, where he owned the AI side.

The data was the trigger. The team is why I signed.

Why I called back

When I passed in May 2025, I wrote to Mike: I am often mistaken and might regret this choice.

By April 2026 I had watched them for eighteen months. The parent-paid model was working. The US was cheaper, faster, and stickier than home. The team was stronger. So I asked for another call, and this time I invested.

A founder who keeps building after a no? I read everything.