The best venture stories rarely look like much at the start.

When Icehouse Ventures first backed Calocurb, it was a New Zealand project generating around $12,000 revenue per month – a genuinely novel piece of Kiwi science in search of a market. I joined the board, and we backed the team through the years that followed.

Today, Calocurb is growing 200% year-on-year, with around 90% of revenue coming from the United States. They are profitable. And I’m proud to share that Icehouse Ventures has led their Series A.

I share why below, and what I think Calocurb says about where weight management is heading.

The deal

Icehouse Ventures has led Calocurb's Series A, including investing $5m from our Growth Fund III, the second confirmed investment for this fund following Halter.

Alongside us, KiwiSaver provider Generate has made a $10m direct co-investment.

“Generate’s investment in Calocurb marks our 4th direct investment facilitated by Icehouse Ventures. We are excited that our members get to support the growth of another Kiwi company that is kicking goals on the global stage.” – Sam Goldwater, Generate Chief Investment Officer and Executive Director.

Everyday New Zealanders are now backing world-class companies being built here through their KiwiSaver funds. 

The category: don’t fight the wave, ride it

You cannot talk about weight management today without talking about GLP-1s. The prescription GLP-1 market is on track to grow from around US$36B in 2023 to roughly US$217B by 2031. Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have done something remarkable – they have made appetite regulation a mainstream conversation.

The instinct is to read this as a threat to anything that is not a blockbuster drug. I see it the other way around. Calocurb doesn’t compete with that wave; it rides it.

The injectables are expensive, and the list of downsides people are becoming aware of keeps growing. Around 54% of users report difficulty affording them, and 42% of non-users avoid them specifically because of side effects (KFF, 2024).

As the science and the lived experience catch up with the hype – the cost, the gastrointestinal side effects, the muscle loss – more and more people are looking for a natural, plant-based alternative. It is telling that 60% of people considering a GLP-1 say they would try a supplement first (Nutrition Business Journal, 2024). As millions cycle on and off these drugs, a large and growing population needs a way to manage appetite and hold their results – without the cost, the needles, or the rebound.

That is the market Calocurb serves.

The science and what gave us the conviction to lead

Calocurb’s active ingredient, Amarasate®, is a bitter hop extract that prompts your body to release its own satiety hormones – GLP-1, CCK, and PYY – rather than introducing a synthetic version. It is a natural, over-the-counter capsule retailing at around one dollar per capsule, versus north of US$1,000 a month for the injectables. That science came out of 10+ years and around $30m of government-funded research before founder and CEO Sarah Kennedy licensed the technology and built a company around it.

We committed to this round before Calocurb’s fourth clinical trial was published. What gave us the conviction to lead was the early read resulting from that study: a consistent signal that people were losing fat while holding onto their muscle. In a category full of noise, that was the signal that mattered.

Here is why it mattered so much. The uncomfortable secret of the injectable era is that when people lose weight on GLP-1 drugs, a large share of what they lose isn’t fat; it’s muscle. The evidence suggests 25-40% of the weight lost while on injectables comes from lean muscle, which matters enormously for strength, metabolism, and healthy ageing.

Recently, that early signal became peer-reviewed fact. Calocurb's fourth clinical trial, a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study run over 24 weeks, was published in the journal Obesity Pillars, confirming what the early data had pointed to: meaningful body-weight and body-fat loss, including a significant reduction in harmful visceral fat, with no loss of muscle mass. There are few better feelings as an investor than backing a conviction and then watching independent, published evidence confirm it.

That is the whole proposition, and it is now the brand’s promise: Keep the muscle. Lose the weight.

I want to be straight about this, because credibility is the entire game in this category: the injectables still drive greater total weight loss than a supplement does, and for many patients they are the right clinical choice. Calocurb is not trying to beat them on the scale. They are competing on something different, and over a lifetime, arguably more meaningful: the quality of the weight you lose, at a fraction of the cost, with none of the needles.

For the growing number of people who cannot take the drugs, won’t take them because of the side effects, or are coming off them and want to protect their progress, a natural, plant-based option that preserves muscle is a genuinely differentiated answer. It is why US clinicians are increasingly reaching for it every day.

The bigger picture

New Zealand punches above its weight in science. Where we have historically fallen short is turning that science into globally significant companies and making sure New Zealanders share in the upside when we do.

Calocurb is a case study in getting that right: Kiwi research, a Kiwi-built brand, a clinically validated product, scaling in the world’s largest healthcare market, and part-funded by New Zealanders’ own retirement savings. Fourteen years of publicly funded research has become a profitable company competing – and winning – on the global stage.

That is why Icehouse Ventures led this round. And it is why I am as excited about this one as anything we have backed.

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Jason Wang is a Partner at Icehouse Ventures, New Zealand's most active venture capital firm. Icehouse Ventures is on a mission to transformative investors in transformative Kiwi companies. 

This article represents the personal views of the author and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Readers should seek independent financial advice before making investment decisions.

Connect with Jason here.