Whitney Tingle was 25 when she and her childhood best friend, Danielle Duboise, started Sakara Life with $700 between them. The idea came out of Tingle’s own struggle with chronic skin issues — she’d spent years cycling through treatments before discovering that what she ate mattered more than what she put on her face, and decided the fix she wanted didn’t exist yet as a business.
So they built it themselves, with no funding, for four years. Sakara delivers organic, plant-rich meals designed around metabolism and gut health, blending nutrition science with older food traditions — a pitch that sounded niche in 2011 and considerably less niche a decade into the wellness industry’s mainstreaming. The company didn’t raise its first outside capital, a $4.8 million Series A, until 2015; by 2021 it had brought in $20 million total, including a $15 million Series B.
The bootstrapped years mattered. By the time Sakara took investment, it wasn’t a pitch deck — it was a business already doing real revenue, and Tingle and Duboise were negotiating from a position most first-time founders never get to occupy. Today, Sakara does roughly $150 million a year in revenue, is profitable, and the two co-founders have kept majority ownership of the company — a rarity at that scale.
Tingle has described the founding insight simply: “Discovering the power of plants completely transformed our bodies and our lives.” She’s since become a national best-selling author with Sakara’s debut cookbook, a certified holistic health coach, and co-host of the Sakara Life podcast — all extensions of the same core bet she made at 25, that credibility built slowly on an actual result beats a growth story built on funding alone.
Sakara isn’t a Silicon Valley story, and that’s the point. It’s proof that a wellness business can start as two friends solving their own problem with $700, refuse outside money until the business earns the right to want it, and still end up worth nine figures a year.