KIND Founder Daniel Lubetzky Puts $62 Million Into Nasal Strips

Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND Snacks, has placed the largest bet in his investing career — $62 million — on a nasal strip company called Intake Breathing. The deal, announced by his investment platform Camino Partners, is the biggest check the fund has ever written.

"This is the company that most reminds me of KIND," Lubetzky said. "That's how excited I am."

Camino Partners, founded by Lubetzky and led by President Elle Lanning, is backing a fast-growing maker of nasal strips already used by top-tier athletes. The thesis is straightforward. KIND took snack bars that were unfamiliar, overlooked or slightly stigmatized and turned them into an everyday health habit. Lubetzky and Lanning believe Intake can do the same for nasal strips.

What convinced Lubetzky to write the check?

For Lubetzky, a recurring investor on Shark Tank, the decision started with data — and the retention numbers stopped him cold.

"The data is insane," he said. "Like when I looked at the data with my team, I'm like, my God, I'm so excited. I've not seen this data since KIND days. People try Intake and then they keep going."

That repeat behavior matters in an industry where most products can't prove they work. Many supplements and wellness items fail to create repeat customers because users can't tell if anything is happening. "But with Intake, you immediately feel it," he said. "You understand that it's working. When you sleep, you sleep better. You know that you sleep better."

Lanning, who worked alongside Lubetzky during KIND's rise, sees a second advantage: mass-market familiarity. Consumers already know what a nasal strip is. The problem is positioning. The category has been framed narrowly, as something you use only when you're sick or congested. An entrepreneur who finds a narrowly used product and invents new occasions for it, she argues, can expand and define the category on their own terms.

"I think this is very much a shift to quality breathing as a foundational part of your everyday health," Lanning said. Both she and Lubetzky wore Intake strips during the interview.

The model also builds in recurring revenue. Strips run out, and refills come on a schedule. Intake sells packs of 30 uses for $40 and monthly subscriptions for $25.

Where did Intake come from?

The company wasn't born as a wellness brand. Its origin traces to 1980, when a serial inventor and avid skier named Jim Castillo was struck by a car. Doctors warned him against skiing again — another injury could permanently damage his knee. He built his own protective knee brace instead, then co-founded Innovation Sports, which became a leading manufacturer of athletic knee braces and entered the motocross market in 1983.

In 2014, Castillo attacked a different motocross problem: goggles often pinch a rider's nostrils and restrict breathing during competition. His solution was a small magnetic clip paired with a metal tab stuck to the rider's nose, designed to sell as a goggle accessory. The prototype worked but sat idle for years. Castillo's family pushed it forward as a standalone breathing product, financed the first production run, and his son-in-law Alex Hauck became CEO. A Kickstarter campaign in 2019 accelerated the launch.

Since then, Intake has grown organically, selling exclusively online and spreading through wellness and athletic communities. Now Camino wants to add operational firepower.

What changes with Camino's money?

Lanning praised the company's instincts. "Everything they've done has been really intuitive," she said, "which also is something that's important in founder-based businesses."

Her team plans to help Intake build retail partnerships, sharpen its brand positioning and expand athlete endorsements — the move from direct-to-consumer into physical retail being the clearest growth lever.

Lubetzky, though, attached a caveat for every entrepreneur watching the deal. Investors can't transform a business unless the product is already top notch. "In consumer product goods, the product is king," he said. "If you do not have a killer product perfected, you can invest all you want, market all you want, at the end it's not gonna take off."

The larger lesson Lubetzky draws from the deal: the biggest opportunities often sit in underdeveloped markets — categories everyone knows but nobody has bothered to expand. If Intake's retention data holds as it scales into retail, the $62 million bet may look, in hindsight, like a bargain entry into a category waiting to be redefined.