Funding profile · Teledermatology

Dear Brightly

A Y Combinator company with a subscription business, nine years of operation and almost no financing record. No Form D has ever been filed. The disclosed capital is $125,000.

$120KY Combinator investment, Winter 2018, the only sizeable disclosed amount
$125KTotal raised to date across four recorded deals, per PitchBook
0Form D notices filed with the SEC under any known company name
7Investors on file, two of them unnamed angels

Data as of September 23, 2026. Company-reported and data-provider figures are labeled.

Rounds at a glance

When Round Amount Investors Source
Mar 14, 2018 Accelerator, Y Combinator Winter 2018 $120,000 Y Combinator Data provider
Aug 1, 2019 Early stage VC Not disclosed Not named in the record Data provider
Jan 1, 2020 Early stage VC Not disclosed Not named in the record Data provider
Feb 22, 2021 Accelerator, Target Takeoff Beauty $5,000 Target Accelerators Data provider
Undated Holders listed without a round Not disclosed AltaIR Capital, NextView Ventures, two angels Data provider
2018 to 2026 Regulation D offerings None on record None SEC
2017 to 2026 Federal grants None on record None NIH, NSF

What the filings show

SEC EDGAR · no Form D on record · searched Sep 23, 2026

Company search
Dear Brightly, Dearbrightly, DermaLoop, form type D: zero results
Full text search
“Dear Brightly”, “DermaLoop”, “dearbrightly”: zero hits in any form type
Investment vehicles
No SPV or pooled fund named for the company
Implication
Either no Regulation D offering was made, or financings were done under Section 4(a)(2), which requires no Form D

Federal award databases · no award on record · searched Sep 23, 2026

NIH RePORTER
No award to the company
NSF
One name match, award 2209408, a 2023 biology postdoctoral fellowship to an unrelated awardee, William Brightly
FDA
No 510(k), PMA or approved application. The product is a compounded drug under section 503A

Reading the filings

  1. The absence of a Form D is the finding.A company that has operated a paying subscription since 2018 and has two venture firms on its cap table has filed nothing under Regulation D. Form D is due within 15 days of a first sale. The likeliest reading is that the 2019 and 2020 financings were small and done under Section 4(a)(2), which carries no filing duty, rather than that they did not happen.
  2. The arithmetic of the disclosed total is trivial.PitchBook’s $125,000 is $120,000 plus $5,000. The two rounds it labels Early Stage VC carry no amount at all. So $125,000 is a floor, not a total, and the true figure above it is unknown.
  3. The Y Combinator cheque implies the only valuation anchor available.Y Combinator’s deal before the Winter 2019 batch was, in its own words, “our previous deal of $120K for 7%, which was typically executed by buying common stock coupled with a safe”. Dear Brightly was Winter 2018, so $120,000 for 7% implies a post-money of about $1.71 million in March 2018. Nothing later in the record updates it.
  4. Two venture firms appear with no round attached.AltaIR Capital and NextView Ventures are listed as minority holders with no participating round, no date and no amount. That pattern usually means a small seed cheque that never produced a public announcement. Neither firm has published anything about the company.
  5. Revenue, not capital, has carried this company.The offer is a $66 trial bottle and then $99 a quarter, with auto-refill and a required repeat consultation after a year. At five employees and no institutional round in six years, the subscription line is doing the work that venture money does elsewhere. The founder claims strong cohort retention; nothing independent verifies it.
  6. The regulatory position is cheap to hold and cheap to lose.A 503A compounded drug needs no approval, no trial and no grant, which is why the evidence page is empty. The same exemption is conditional on the compounder not making essentially copies of marketed products, and FDA’s 2018 guidance treats a strength move from .08% to .09% as potentially too small to count. The published ceiling for Night Shift is 0.089%.

Commercial signals

Signal Detail Source type
Pricing $66 trial bottle, about two months. Refills $99 per quarter. A customer on that plan was quoted by the Times in 2023. Company-stated
Geography Prescription products in 31 states per a 2021 review. No current list published. Independent
Headcount Five employees per PitchBook; three per Y Combinator directory data. Data provider
Supply chain Compounding pharmacy unnamed. PCAB-accredited pharmacies were reported in 2018. Not published
Recognition Target Takeoff Beauty 2021 cohort. Beauty Innovation Awards Personalized Skin Care Product of the Year, Nov 2024. Company and award
Clinical evidence No trial, no peer-reviewed paper, no federal grant. Not found

What to watch

  • A first Form D. It would be the first hard number since 2018.
  • Whether AltaIR Capital or NextView Ventures ever confirms a position.
  • Any state pharmacy or medical board action that narrows the prescribing footprint.
  • A named compounding pharmacy, and whether it is a 503A pharmacy or a 503B outsourcing facility.

The Dear Brightly story on Healthcare DiscoveryHealthcare Discovery

Related companies

  • SimplyInsured: Shared investor: Altair Capital. A licensed online brokerage selling group health plans to the smallest employers in America
  • Datrics: Shared investor: Altair Capital. A Ukrainian no-code analytics startup that went through Y Combinator in 2021 has renamed its flagship product Datrics HCP and now pitches itself as generative AI for
  • MDalgorithms: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. A dermatologist and his son built an app that grades a selfie and ships a customized acne kit
  • Measured: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. A New York telehealth subscription that routes patients either to branded GLP-1 medicines through insurance or to compounded copies shipped to the door

Sources

  1. Public recordSEC EDGAR company and full text search, Dear Brightly, Dearbrightly, DermaLoopSEC · Sep 23, 2026
  2. Public recordNSF award 2209408, awardee William BrightlyNSF · 2023
  3. Public recordSection 503A, FD&C Act, and the FDA essentially copies guidanceFDA · 2018
  4. IndependentDear Brightly company profile, deal history, investors and headcountPitchBook
  5. IndependentDearBrightly profile, founding year and total raisedCB Insights
  6. IndependentNew Standard Deal, the $120K for 7% termsY Combinator · Sep 28, 2018
  7. IndependentY Combinator increases deal size to $150kVentureburn · Oct 2018
  8. IndependentYC-backed DearBrightly makes Rx skin care more accessibleTechCrunch · Mar 13, 2018
  9. IndependentI Sent My Doctor a Selfie. Intentionally.The New York Times · Nov 13, 2023
  10. IndependentDear Brightly review, with the 31 state listReliefSeeker
  11. IndependentDear Brightly company listing, batch W18YCDB
  12. CompanyDear Brightly pricing, FAQ and Night Shift product pagedearbrightly.com · Sep 23, 2026

Compiled from SEC, NSF, NIH and FDA public records, commercial data providers and published reports as of September 23, 2026. No Form D notice has been filed by or for this company; amounts shown come from data providers and press reports and may be incomplete. Healthcare Venture Capital Fund holds no position in Dear Brightly. This page is not an offer to sell or a recommendation to buy any security.