Hair and scalp care has a new entrant — and he’s flush with funding.
KilgourMD, the scalp care brand that targets hair loss in women going through menopause, has closed a new funding round totaling $5 million. The round, led by Willow Growth Partners — the same fund behind Bubble Skincare and Jupiter — also saw participation from Joyance Partners and Able Partners.
As a result, Deborah Benton, founder and general partner of Willow, will join the brand’s board.
KilgourMD was founded by James Kilgour, MD, the practicing dermatologist and clinical researcher, in 2024. He identified the white space for the brand during his time practicing as a dermatologist.
“I was seeing men for hair loss, but for every man, I was seeing four to five women,” Kilgour said. “I was amazed at how little this group of consumers had been thought about and underappreciated. I was disappointed by existing treatments, which all had a lot of side effects, and my patients didn’t enjoy using them.”
He also recognized that more research and literature around hair loss was targeting scalp health, and with his suite of products, which are sold directly on the brand’s website, he was hoping to take a more preventative philosophy to the need state.
“Healthy hair growth is a product of a healthy scalp, and scalp health is essential. That was the paradigm shift in thinking about how we can look at this in a preventative sense,” Kilgour said. “These audiences have been neglected, particularly women, and particularly women in menopause. And more recently, in my practice, I’m seeing so many people on GLP-1s experiencing hair loss. It’s the same fundamental concept: A huge group of people are being addressed with a more preventative and holistic alternative to pharmaceutical options.”
He started developing the products in January 2023, and only has two products — a treatment serum and a prevention serum, which each sell for $89.
“We managed to gain attention through a clever approach to telling our story,” Kilgour said. “Prior to this current fundraising round, we had only raised $400,000 in total. And we’ve grown to be a multi-, multimillion-dollar business through high capital efficiency, profitability and cash flow. And we were able to do that because of product-market fit, because the products resonated with our customers.”
To that end, the brand’s retention rates are at 55 percent for a 90-day period. “Through 2025, we’ve had double- to triple-digit growth month-over-month. We also have a quite significant base of subscribers who are receiving our products on a 30-, 60- or 90-day cadence. And the business has growth very quickly as a result,” he said.
Though the raise took 18 months to complete, Kilgour contended that the company wasn’t in a position where it was entirely necessary. “We wanted to,” he said, “and we wanted to find a partner that wasn’t just offering blind capital but was offering partnership, strategic guidance, support and mentorship.”
Much of that is what attracted Benton to the business, particularly how deep and narrow KilgourMD’s focus is on a giant yet largely underserved demographic. (Gen X represents 20 percent of the population and spends $173 billion on general merchandise annually, as reported.)
“We look for market-makers, we look for founders that are quite often unorthodox and that don’t necessarily come from the beauty industry,” Benton said. “I’m personally very passionate about supporting women across different life stages, and a lot of that is hormonally based. There’s so much done in [facial skin care] around that space, but nobody was thinking about scalp care and how that correlated to hair health, and I became very interested through a lot of our research around hair shedding, hair thinning, hair loss, and areas like postpartum, perimenopause, menopause.”
The funding will go toward fueling new product development primarily. “We have a lot more exciting products in the pipeline, expanding what scalp health is, and bringing innovative products to market. We also want to expand our infrastructure and our team, given that our customers are on this journey and the growth is so high. And we want to create a program that isn’t just a product people buy online, but that’s a whole guided experience. We’re investing in data-driven analytics, AI, and all the tools to create a personalized and supportive program,” Kilgour said.
As for how he’s thinking about expanding the range, “we are certainly not done with this demographic — menopausal women in particular,” Kilgour said. “We’re obviously focused on hair growth, but the overarching vision of the brand is to be a pioneer in scalp health, understanding what is innovative and novel, and address the significant issues that affect people on a day-to-day level. There are rising rates of skin cancer, dandruff and, of course, hair loss. The vision is to pioneer this sector of skin care.”
#Willow #Growth #Partners #Invests #KilgourMD #Scalp #Health #Brand
