Founded in 2024 by longevity enthusiast Erika Paulė and business partner Dr. Sarunas Paskevicius, the brand builds on the pair’s earlier venture, Longevity Lab, which cultivates medicinal mushrooms in controlled bioreactors to produce concentrated bioactives for supplements, functional foods and cosmetics.
Through Sooo.me, the entrepreneurs are bringing those extracts, plus others, directly to consumers, offering a range of supplements designed to target the 12 hallmarks of aging. Each formulation is batch-by-batch HPLC tested and marketed as up to 99.9% pure, with no added fillers.
Supplement in the eight-strong range are named after the each formulation’s health target: Calm (reishi plus vitamin B), Cellular (quercetin, fisetin, l-glycine and zinc), Energetic (cordyceps and vitamin B6) and Lean (green tea extract, EGCG, berberine, Shilajit, spermidine and zinc).
The range is available across the EU, UK and Middle East, online as well as in longevity clinics, Holland & Barrett and Healf.
Despite making inroads across borders, Paulė said the journey has not been easy and that she is still developing the ideal formula for capturing consumers without hefty marketing budgets.
NI+: What is your background and how did you come to meet your business partner?
EP: I have a background in mathematics, MBA and design thinking at MIT and I’ve been biohacking myself long before it was a mainstream term—experimenting early with newly emerging molecules and adaptogenic mushrooms, testing things on myself well before “biohacking” became a buzzword.
Being naturally geeky, meticulous and a bit of a perfectionist, I kept noticing the same problem across the supplement industry: Most brands lean heavily on marketing and aren’t always transparent about their ingredients, or they’re simply hard for a regular person to understand. That frustration is what eventually pushed me to build Sooo.me.
I met Sarunas Paskevicius around four years ago, through mutual friends. Within minutes we were deep in conversation about longevity, molecules and mushrooms, and pretty soon nobody else at the table knew what we were talking about. I already had the idea of a sustainable, science-first brand in my head, and I think life brought us together for that reason.
We started researching a lot of, honestly, pretty unconventional directions—everything from building a sustainable mushroom farm to different extraction methods for longevity molecules. At one point we seriously considered becoming mushroom farmers and quickly realized that wasn’t who we wanted to be.
Eventually we landed on the idea that became the lab: Instead of farming, ferment the mycelium in bioreactors. That single shift changed everything—it gave us standardized batches with very high potency of active compounds and cut production time from four months on a farm to 20 days in a lab. It sounds simple in one sentence, but it took extensive testing, scaling, plenty of failures and a lot of persistence to get there.
NI+: What was the gap in the market that Longevity Lab aimed to fill?
EP: The longevity lab was created out of a very specific frustration: Adaptogenic mushrooms sold under the same name can vary wildly in quality depending on how they were grown, harvested and extracted—so a “reishi” from one batch might behave nothing like a “reishi” from the next. The lab exists to solve that, to standardize adaptogenic mushroom ingredients so they perform consistently, batch after batch, using bioreactor fermentation instead of traditional farming.
Today the lab does extensive work standardizing mushrooms like cordyceps, lion’s mane, reishi and ruby, among others. We also partner with universities and research institutions to build a stronger evidence base on how these mushrooms actually benefit humans. One current project, for example, looks at how the microbiome responds to adaptogens following cancer treatment.
NI+: What is unique about the way you produce your formulations?
No fillers, no additives—only extracts and molecules at the highest purity standard, currently verified at 99.89% and free from heavy metals. Dosing and combinations are chosen by following published scientific data on optimal dose and the interactions between ingredients, mapped against the 12 hallmarks of aging—the framework internationally recognized by aging researchers.
Sustainability matters to us as much as purity does—microplastics are a real and often overlooked problem in this industry. That’s why Sooo.me uses only biodegradable packaging, down to the seal on the jar. Nothing about the product, inside or out, should be something you’d rather your body—or the planet—didn’t have to deal with.
NI+: What have been some of the biggest challenges in building this business?
EP: Honestly, I thought this business would be easier than it turned out to be. What frustrates me most is that the wider market plays heavily on marketing, pouring budgets into celebrity endorsements, while the substance often takes a back seat.
Regulation is part of the problem too, but not in the way people usually assume. Authorities mostly police the claims—the marketing language, the statements you’re allowed to make—while largely ignoring the quality and production of the ingredients themselves. Mushrooms aren’t equal just because they share a name on a label. It matters how they were grown, how they were harvested and how the active compounds were extracted.
It’s the same with molecules. What actually matters is purity. You might be taking five pills of something impure when one properly dosed, pure ingredient would do the job.
I don’t really see this as a ‘bad’ challenge though. I see it more as a mathematical and design problem to solve: How do you build out a brand’s whole product menu so precisely that people never feel lost in the choices.
NI+: What have been some key highlights?
EP: We’re now in the main pharmacy chains in Lithuania, Eurovaistinė and Benu, as well as eco retail stores like Livin and Assorti. More recently, we’ve stepped into the UK market through Healf and Holland & Barrett, and we have a fresh partnership in the Middle East. We’re now looking for retail partners in Germany and the US.
We’re also about to launch a couple of new products soon, staying true to the same principles: no added sugar, no artificial flavors, no fillers—nothing in the formula that isn’t either beneficial or simply unnecessary for the body.
We’ve also started noticing the wellness trend spilling into drink consumption, so we began approaching cafés and restaurants to bring healthy ingredients into their drink menus. It turns out mushrooms make a surprisingly tasty, gut-friendly latte and can either replace or enhance coffee. We’ve introduced this concept through Caffeine, the largest café network in the Baltics, as well as a number of hipster spots and Michelin-starred restaurants—think collagen matcha, lion’s mane or cordyceps lattes, cold protein coffee and similar drinks.
NI+: Who do you see as your key target consumers?
EP: Our core audience spans anyone who wants more good years, not just more years, from busy professionals and entrepreneurs looking to stay sharp under pressure, to active people across sports focused on endurance and performance, to those in their 60s and beyond who want to keep body and mind youthful for longer. We also see a broader audience simply interested in looking and feeling youthful day to day. Ages and lifestyles vary widely, but the common thread is the same: people who care about the quality of their years, not just the number of them.
Beyond that core audience, our move into cafés and restaurants is opening up a more casual, social entry point into the brand. Someone who’d never buy a supplement jar might happily order a lion’s mane latte, discover they like how it makes them feel, and that becomes their first step into the world of Sooo.me.
NI+: What would be your advice to other startups innovating in this space?
EP: Patience and surrounding yourself with the right people is what lets the truth eventually come through. Be honest, and build products that genuinely do good for the people using them.
