The founder and chief executive officer of Native, the natural deodorant and personal-care company that Procter & Gamble paid $100 million for in 2017, is exiting the business.

Moiz Ali, who founded the business in 2015, is leaving as of Jan. 31. The choice is mutual, Ali and P&G said, and is supposed to permit Ali to shift back into entrepreneur mode. In an internal e-mail, P&G said it “respects and supports” Ali’s departure.

Since P&G acquired Native, the brand has quadrupled in size and is nearing $100 million in sales, executives said, partially by expanding its reach in brick-and-mortar retail with Goal, Walmart and Walgreens.

Ali, who has invested in dozens of tech start-ups and serves as a mentor to other entrepreneurs, said he can have found one other e-commerce business in the longer term. “My time at Native has given me a terrific perspective by way of how the industry has evolved. I began in [e-commerce] in 2012, so I’m an actual dinosaur,” Ali said. “My DNA is to get my hands really dirty and never just play mentorship roles…I might do one other e-commerce company — it’s where my passion is.”

Ali might be succeeded as Native’s ceo by Vineet Kumar, who’s currently director of P&G Asia Skin Care. Kumar and his family will relocate to San Francisco, where Native is predicated.

His arrival comes with grand aspirations — first, to grow Native to a $500 million brand through sales in North America, then, to grow to $1 billion globally.

“It’s actually tracking to deliver near $100 million this yr,” Kumar said in an interview, noting that while Native’s sales are growing, it has a giant opportunity by way of consumer awareness. “Lower than 4 percent [of people] are literally aware of Native as a brand, so we’ve got huge runway,” he said.

To grow the business, Kumar plans to concentrate on Native’s core — deodorant — with selective category expansion. He just began using the brand’s hero scent, coconut vanilla, he said.

“We may select selectively certain other categories where there may be a task for Native to play strategically,” Kumar said. “We just launched a private body wash…we plan to enter oral care soon…at once, the most important focus for the team is the concentrate on the [deodorant] brand.”

While Ali is leaving, the remaining of Native’s team is staying on board. Markus Strobel, president of worldwide skin & personal care at P&G, joked that the group may even try to purchase an Ali-founded future business. “At some point he’s going to found something recent that perhaps we’ve got one other probability to accumulate,” Strobel said.

Asked about keeping Native’s spirit alive once its founder leaves, Strobel said, “In case you asked me that query 5 – 6 years ago I might have said…that’s going to be really difficult. Within the last couple of years, working with Moiz and Lilli Gordon at First Aid Beauty, we learned so much about entrepreneurship, and I feel we understand a lot better…it’s not our way or the highway.”

With Native, Strobel said P&G “learned a ton when it got here to [direct-to-consumer]” and social media marketing, and was in a position to apply those learnings to other businesses. “We’re within the business of making quite a number of brands now since the market is segmenting,” Strobel added.

He said that getting Kumar into the job was a part of his overall plan for the longer term of Native, calling him “my dream candidate.”

Ali said that he didn’t regret selling the corporate to P&G. “I’ve had a improbable time working with P&G. Once you’re stepping into an acquisition…you actually don’t know what you’re going to get into since you’re a tiny fish in a ginormous pond, and a number of people come to regret that,” Ali said.

After selling off most of its beauty portfolio to Coty Inc. in 2016, P&G got back into the acquisition game with Native, which was its first purchase within the personal-care realm in years. Since then, the corporate has gone on to accumulate several other businesses, including First Aid Beauty, Snowberry and Walker & Co.

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