Natals, Inc. d/b/a Ritual

Overview. Natals, Inc., doing business as Ritual, is a privately held dietary-supplement brand incorporated in 2015 (first product launched October 2016) by founder/CEO Katerina Schneider. It is headquartered at 1370 N St Andrews Place, Los Angeles, CA 90028 (earlier coverage placed it in Culver City). PitchBook lists roughly 190 employees as of 2025 and about $68M raised from investors including Founders Fund, Forerunner Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Upfront Ventures; CNBC reported more than $250M in 2024 gross revenue. It has no disclosed parent company or public ticker.

Products/operations. Ritual sells subscription and retail vitamins, minerals and supplements: women's multivitamins (18+, prenatal, 50+), men's and teen formulas, Synbiotic+ gut health, sleep/stress and magnesium products, and plant-based Essential Protein shakes. Distribution is direct-to-consumer at ritual.com plus Amazon, Target, Whole Foods, Wegmans, Costco and its own Venice, California store. Its signature technology is a transparent "capsule-in-capsule" (nested) design placing oil-based nutrients in the outer capsule and dry nutrients in a delayed-release inner capsule.

Patenting/litigation posture. Ritual is an operating consumer-goods company, not an NPE. The tracked data show one case, all as plaintiff and none as defendant: it filed a declaratory-judgment action (28 U.S.C. §2201; nature of suit 830) against InnerCap Technologies, Inc. in the Central District of California on May 27, 2026. That profile — a single plaintiff-side DJ in its home district rather than an Eastern District of Texas assertion campaign — is consistent with a defensive response to another party's patent demands, not offensive monetization.

Notable case/context. InnerCap Technologies (founded 2003, Tampa, Florida) owns U.S. Patents 7,670,612 and 9,539,216 on multi-phase, multi-compartment ("capsule-in-capsule") delivery systems and has asserted the '612 patent against retailers selling Ritual-branded capsules — Target (D. Minn., April 30, 2026) and Walmart (D. Del., April 27, 2026) — as well as against Natals itself in D. Del. (No. 1:26-cv-00823, filed July 8, 2026, under 35 U.S.C. §271); that Delaware suit is not in our tracked list. Lexology's May 2026 retail patent litigation report lists InnerCap among that month's frequent filers. Separately, Lonza Greenwood LLC sued Natals in S.D.N.Y. in July 2025 alleging trade-secret misappropriation in capsule manufacturing, and Natals faces consumer class actions (N.D. Cal., June 2026) over "essential vitamins" advertising claims.