About the Guest
Eric Kau is the co-founder and CEO of Climatic, a consumer health technology company building products around lung health and respiratory wellness. Before Climatic, he served as COO of Seed Health and was part of the foundational team at Chewy. Earlier in his career, Eric held growth and operational leadership roles across consumer, wellness, and e-commerce businesses, including Amazon, BoxyCharm, Target, and Best Buy.
Interview Summary
After years of operating across wellness, e-commerce, and consumer health, Eric became increasingly interested in a disconnect: collectively we have been focused on heart, bone, gut, skin, and hair health, yet lung health — despite the roughly 20,000 breaths people take each day — has been largely ignored
Personal experiences with respiratory conditions across the founding team, along with worsening air quality exposure during the Canadian wildfires, further shaped the company’s early direction.
Climatic’s first product, L Max, is an inhaled dry-powder formula designed to support airway clearance and lung function, which Eric describes as a more proactive, “multivitamin”-style approach to lung health.
Development began with in vitro research around lung cells and different compound combinations before progressing into in vivo studies with Mount Sinai, where Climatic’s formulation improved mucus clearance by more than 50% in preclinical testing. The company later expanded into beta studies, toxicology testing, and an ongoing placebo-controlled clinical trial with People Science. Given the historical stigma associated with inhaled consumer products, Climatic invested heavily in safety and efficacy validation as it prepared to bring the category to market.
Prototype versions of the product were intentionally seeded to consumers for more than a year before launch, with the team using ongoing customer conversations and user feedback to refine the product experience, clinical direction, and broader go-to-market approach.
Rather than market broadly at launch, Climatic focused early on endurance athletes, wellness optimizers, and biohackers. The company officially launched L Max in spring 2026 and sold through its initial production batch shortly afterward. Climatic previously raised a $10 million round to support development and commercialization efforts.
Top Takeaways
In a new category, education is part of the product. When consumers don’t yet recognize the category, education becomes a prerequisite for demand. Start with the people already most receptive to the problem and embed into the products, communities, and behaviors they already trust. Climatic focused early on endurance athletes and wellness optimizers, using adjacent communities like Strava run clubs to build a 15,000-person waitlist before launch.
Early users should shape both market strategy and clinical strategy. In emerging categories, get prototypes into real-world use early, then study behavior closely: who adopts fastest, which outcomes matter most, and where usage becomes habitual. Those signals can sharpen positioning, identify the right initial customer cohort, and reveal which claims deserve deeper clinical validation.
In consumer health, behavior design matters as much as product design. Consumers rarely adopt new wellness habits through efficacy alone. Design around the moments, environments, and routines that already exist in a user’s life so adoption feels frictionless rather than additive. Ease of use, portability, sensory experience, and routine integration all play a critical role in turning product use into a consistent habit.
Sponsors
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