How Lauren Picasso Navigated Fundraising Challenges to Grow Cure Hydration

“It's all about, you know, investors are going to be looking at your background and whether they believe in the idea. Sure, but are you going to be able to execute on this idea?”

Starting a business often begins with noticing a gap, something people need that isn’t being met.

For Lauren Picasso, that moment came while training for a triathlon. What she needed was straightforward: a clean, effective hydration solution. What she found instead was a category filled with products that worked, but relied on ingredients she didn’t want to consume. That gap became the starting point for Cure Hydration.

Turning that idea into a real business required more than product development. It meant learning an entirely new industry, building from scratch without a large team, and making critical decisions about when, and how, to raise capital. Along the way, Lauren navigated early uncertainty, a global pandemic, and the realities of scaling into retail without the infrastructure most founders take for granted.

In this episode of the Entreprenista Podcast, Lauren shares how she built Cure from a personal solution into a growing brand. She breaks down the realities of fundraising, what it actually takes to get a product to market, and how she approached growth without the massive budgets she had access to earlier in her career.

If you’re building a product-based business, or thinking about raising capital, this conversation offers a clear, experience-driven look at what that process really involves.

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify and Apple Podcast.

Here are a few moments from the podcast:

Her entrepreneurial instincts started early, shaped by both curiosity and exposure:
“Honestly, I did. Even as a kid, I loved to cook and I loved to bake especially. I always thought one day I would start a bakery… my father is also an entrepreneur and started his own business, so I was always really inspired by his journey and knew I wanted to do the same one day.”

Her early career gave her a front-row seat to how companies scale—and what that actually requires:
“I started at Jet pre-launch and then saw it all the way through acquisition… going from a 10-person company to working at one of the biggest companies in the world…

So I think after that, I finally felt like, okay, I really now have this great journey of what it takes to scale a company.”

The idea for Cure came from a real, unmet need she experienced firsthand:
“I was looking for an electrolyte product to help me and I was just so disappointed by all of the options at the time…

The only product you could really find that worked… had artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, tons of added sugar… so I started making my own sports drink at home…

I tried to mirror the exact same electrolyte profile of Pedialyte… but instead of using all these artificial ingredients, I was using coconut water and pink Himalayan salt.”

Building the product required learning an entirely new space from the ground up:
“I had no background in R&D, so I did hire a formulator… but I came in with a lot of my own research…

I had this World Health Organization formula that I wanted to follow… I knew the exact amount of sugar, sodium, and potassium we needed…

It was really about asking a lot of questions… how do we create the best product possible… and then iterating again and again to make it taste great while still using clean ingredients.”

Her first fundraising experience reinforced how much relationships matter:
“I went to a mentor of mine to tell him about the friends and family round… and he was like, I think I’ll invest…

He sent it to a couple of people, and within two weeks we had the entire round figured out…

In the early days… it’s all about you… investors are going to be looking at your background… but are you going to be able to execute on this idea.”

When the pandemic disrupted fundraising, she had to rethink her entire approach:
“I went out to raise… and it was the first or second week of March 2020… every investor I talked to was like, I don’t know what’s going on right now…

So I actually ended up raising debt to finance that inventory…

It was definitely very hard to bootstrap to get there, but that allowed us to launch… and then later, when things settled down, we had the revenue and the story to raise institutional capital.”

Looking back, she sees not knowing everything upfront as part of what made it possible to start:
“I think I didn’t know how hard it was going to be… and I think I’m actually grateful that I didn’t know…

Because now that I’m here, it’s been the most rewarding journey I’ve ever been on… but if I knew how hard it was… I don’t know if I would have done it…

So I think going into it a bit naive is maybe actually a good thing.”

You may also like:

• Building a Product-Based Business with Dr. Ronak Mehta
• AI-Powered Social Listening: A Practical Guide for Product Innovation
• Using Customer Feedback To Fuel Product Innovation with Jordan Engelhardt

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Connect with Lauren:

• Instagram: @courtspritzer
• LinkedIn

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Updated on: April 30, 2026