The upstart: Jones
This past fall, a few months after he had quit vaping, Sean Medlin came across a friend’s vape while looking for a set of keys in a pants pocket.
“ It wasn’t just a vape; it was the vape I was stuck on, same flavor and everything,” he said. “ I remember looking at it and studying it for, like, 30 seconds, and my only thought was, ‘I can’t believe this used to have such control over my life.’ And I had no desire to hit it.”
This was a big deal to Medlin, 36, a software engineer in Tulsa, Okla. He had never been proud to vape, but it felt so normalized around him. “ I’d go anywhere. I could just vape, vape, vape, vape, vape, and it didn’t even matter,” he said. “I sought it out because, seemingly, it was helping me with my anxiety. I always told myself I wasn’t actually an addict, and I was going to quit as soon as I was done with this one.”
For over three years, he had tried to quit cold turkey, but it wouldn’t stick. Eventually, he looked up cigarette and nicotine replacement therapy online and came across old-looking government websites where he’d have to submit forms — a process that felt ridiculous. Then, one day, he instead typed “vape cessation programs” on his browser “to see if that was even a thing,” he said, and the first result was for a company called Jones.
Jones was founded in SoHo in 2022 by Caroline Vasquez Huber and Hilary Dubin and was born from their own journey to quit vaping. From her experience, Vasquez Huber said she was “mortified” to show friends the lozenges she was using to quit and would keep them hidden away. Beyond that, the process of quitting itself felt incredibly lonely.
The friends realized that the cessation offerings on the market were neither up-to-date nor comprehensive. According to reports from the Center for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, 2.25 million students in middle and high school nationwide used nicotine products in 2024, 5.9% reported using e-cigarettes or vapes. Similarly, e-cigarette use in adults has increased: three in 10 adults reported using them in 2021, according to the latest data released by the CDC. Philip Morris International, one of the leading cigarette manufacturers, reported “outstanding performance” in their 2024 third-quarter earnings, partially crediting it to other “smoke-free” products like nicotine pouches.
“ Juul came in and modernized smoking for an entire generation. And no one had modernized quitting,” said Dubin. While the co-founders participated in an NYU accelerator program, they surveyed many friends and New Yorkers who vaped. “We felt like the options that were available were extremely outdated. They didn’t speak to our generation,” Dubin added. They didn’t understand what it was like to vape and try to quit vaping.”
Jones’ goal is to make the experience more holistic. The company has a free app for the network of “quitters” that they offer alongside the low-dose, FDA-approved nicotine replacement therapy, mint-flavored lozenges packaged in a mint-green refillable tin. Clients can either make a one-time purchase or monthly subscriptions start at $62 for a pack of 81 mints (with 2 or 4 mg of nicotine) and go up to $159 for three packs with a total of 243 mints. Jones has raised a total of $5 million, including a $3.85 million seed round in early 2024.
The reigning Goliath: Blip
Blip, another nicotine replacement therapy startup that provides FDA-approved products, was co-founded in 2021. The startup’s primary offerings include nicotine gum and lozenges, as well as nicotine-free flavored toothpicks to keep your hands and mouth busy. The products come in hot pink or neon green boxes and explicitly target a younger generation of people looking to quit smoking and vaping. The gum, with flavors like “mint freeze” or “fruit freeze,” starts at $17.99 for a pack of 20 and $49.99 for a pack of 100. The mint “lozzies” go for $17.99 for a pack of 27. The startup has raised over $5.3 million, according to data from Pitchbook.
How to slay the giant
Vasquez Huber and Dubin, best friends since they were 8 years old, separately became addicted to the electronic cigarette called Juul soon after they graduated college in 2017. Juul seemed “more like a fun party trick than an addiction,” Dubin recalled. Plus, all of their friends were doing it, Vasquez Huber added. Could it really be so bad?
Isolating at the onset of the pandemic with her parents at home in Los Angeles, Vasquez Huber tried to quit but found herself extremely agitated and having terrible withdrawal symptoms. She finally came clean to her mother, a doctor.
“ She made me aware that I was smoking the equivalent of around 40 cigarettes a day worth of nicotine,” Vasquez Huber said. “She was like, ‘Of course you can’t quit cold turkey. You’re highly, highly addicted to this.’”
With her mother’s support, she was able to dose herself appropriately through lozenges and a nicotine patch and was successfully able to quit vaping. Vasquez Huber then helped Dubin, who was also having difficulty quitting. Through this process, they both recognized the limitations of the quitting options available on the market.
“ There wasn’t any offering that was addressing both the physiological and the psychological” parts of quitting, Vasquez Huber said. Existing nicotine replacement therapy options only addressed nicotine withdrawal. “ But the other 50 percent of quitting nicotine is really psychological, and all of that depends on all of your habits that you’ve already formed around nicotine use,” she added.
The first step for people signing up for Jones is a quiz to establish a personalized dosage plan. They then access a free texting service with daily expert tips. Finally, on the Jones app, users can log and track their progress, and share updates with over 30,000 people in the “quitting community.” Jones declined to share the exact number of clients or their annual revenue.
“ That has been, I would say, more than half of the journey with Quit With Jones,” Medlin, one of the Jones users, said. “Whenever I think of other [nicotine replacement therapies], I was going to be alone going through that.”
Amanda Herson, a general partner at Founders Collective, a seed-stage venture capital fund in New York that led one of Jones’ funding rounds, said that Vasquez Huber and Dubin’s own experience with vaping and quitting was a big part of what made Jones work. She recounted hearing from friends who’d desperately tried to quit without success.
“ I heard this over and over that there’s this shame, and I think taking the shameful aspect away and making it as something that’s, like, ‘We get you, we know this is freaking hard and we’re going to make this delightful,” Herson said. “I mean, how many people have made quitting anything delightful? How many people openly admit or want to brag about that they’re quitting?”
Next steps
Many of Jones’ users have tried a variety of ways to quit smoking before turning to nicotine replacement therapy.
“ A third of our customers say that to quit vaping, they start using cigarettes, and then people who aren’t using cigarettes are using Zyn” nicotine pouches (a brand owned by Philip Morris), Vasquez Huber said. And while it might feel comparatively safer than smoking or vaping, there’s growing evidence that it also has negative health impacts beyond also being highly addictive. “ We’ve also seen that really funneling into a new generation of people who are starting nicotine use potentially from scratch.”
To them, it shows a desire to quit that is met with a lack of viable options. Jones is exploring how to navigate this and inform potential new clients about the differences between a nicotine pouch and nicotine replacement therapy.
In 2025, they also plan on expanding their retail presence to specialty retailers. Consumers can find Jones tins, with a smaller quantity of 24 mints, at high-end retailers, including Pop Up Grocer on Bleeker Street and Happier Grocery on Canal Street.
