Julie Wainwright is back with a new venture-backed startup

Julie Wainwright, founder and former CEO of publicly traded luxury online consignment company The RealReal, is back with a new startup.

Called Ahara, the Los Angeles-based outfit describes itself as a personalized nutrition company that provides recommendations to its customers after completing a health questionnaire that asks them about their diet and health history, as well as their age and location, after which they can take a variety of home tests for genetics, epigenetics and biomarkers.

According to Ahara, for example, its tests can tell the company how efficiently a person is metabolizing specific nutrients; how healthy his cells are; and which tests an individual's blood levels for key nutrients like vitamin D and omega 3.

Wainwright isn't a wellness expert, but after leaving The RealReal last June after running the company for 11 years, she teamed up with famed doctor-nutritionist Melina Jampolis as a co-founder. Jampolis is also the team's chief medical officer. Indeed, in a low-key press release issued yesterday, the duo – who already have half a dozen other employees on their site – including a performance marketer – say they have themselves contributed to a fundraising round. $10.25 million led by Greycroft, with participation from Headline, SHAKTI and entrepreneur Sandy Sholl.

Ahara is currently in beta and, according to its own literature, will operate a freemium model that offers special benefits to "premium" members.

The fact that the operation seems to require far fewer resources than The RealReal is unsurprising. Wainwright, who previously ran Pets.com, a dot.com-era company, is coming out of a business loved by its customers, but very tough on margins.

During a conversation last week with investor Ian Sigalow of Greycroft - the company was also one of The RealReal's earliest backers - he offered his theories as to why The RealReal displays a market cap of just $170 million after hitting a market cap of $2.39 billion on the day of its IPO three years ago.

While The RealReal was a "really good idea", creating a much more vibrant market for second-hand luxury goods, the "challenge with the model is that it is very capital intensive. Storing clothes is expensive The way they source with so many white gloves is expensive Wainwright "executed the vision very well, but driving a profitable machine and keeping the cost down is just very difficult to manage in this business because it's basically deals with single unique pieces of fashion products, and all of them must be graduated. It's a complicated business to scale."

Ahara joins a growing wave of digital nutrition startups. While each has a slightly different flavor, in the past six months Mighty Health, a four-year-old San Francisco-based startup offering a daily health program designed for adults ages 50 and older, has raised $7.6 million. venture capital dollars; Nourish, a San Francisco-based nutrition telehealth platform, raised $8 million in seed funding; and Zoe, a British nutrition and health tracking app, has also caught the attention of venture capitalists, raising £25m from investors, to name a few.