After being heavily implicated in the teen vaping crisis — including years of legal battles and agreeing to pay out $1.7 billion over claims of misleading advertising — many assumed Juul Labs was a relic of the past.
Now, the company is trying to rise from the ashes of controversy and get back to its original mission —creating smoking cessation devices for adults trying to quit cigarettes — while keeping its product out of the hands of teenagers.
“Everybody kind of thought Juul was dead and evil,” James Sagan, CEO of Architect Capital and an investor in Juul since 2023, told NYNext. “But the early investors and founders have poured a bunch of capital back into the company to save it.”
Juul founders James Monsees and Adam Bowen met as Stanford graduate students in 2005. They were both studying design and initially aimed to make a compact vaping device that would help smokers transition away from traditional tobacco consumption. But, ultimately, instead of offering an alternative to Big Tobacco, the technology was co-opted by it.
Central to Juul’s comeback plan is a new vape device, Juul2, which comes equipped with biometric safeguards intended to limit access to adult smokers only.
Users will have to verify their age and identity through a companion smartphone app — using their iPhone’s Face ID or other phone-based biometric logins — in order to unlock Juul’s flavored pods.
All Juul2 pods will contain a hardware chip that connects to the app via bluetooth and will only unlock for a verified, authorized user who has linked their e-cigarette to their identity.
“The new product is basically trying to solve [two problems simultaneously],” Sagan said. “How do you keep vapes out of the hands of people who shouldn’t be using them — kids — and how do you make it appealing to smokers?”
The Juul2 also includes a larger battery, an LED display showing puff count and battery life and firmware capabilities that allow for remote updates and usage tracking.
The device is currently awaiting regulatory approval in the US; it’s already for sale, without the biometric safeguards, in the UK.
Scientific literature is divided on how effective vapes actually are at helping individuals wean off cigarettes.
The American Heart Association issued a statement in 2023 saying that, while e-cigarettes might be less harmful than combustible cigarettes, more research is needed to determine long-term safety risks. A 2025 analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine found that exclusive tobacco e-cigarette use by adults correlated strongly with hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD.
When Sagan came aboard at Juul two years ago, first as an advisor and later as an investor, the company was embroiled in financial and legal crises.
In 2022, Juul agreed to pay out $1.7 billion to settle several thousand lawsuits brought by school districts, individuals and other entities over claims that its products were more addictive than advertised.
That same year, the company nearly had to remove all products from US shelves due to a Marketing Denial Order from the FDA. After a lengthy legal battle, it was able to keep its products in store, but it was still a crushing blow to the company.
The MDO spooked retailers and further damaged a brand, which, by then, was somewhat synonymous with youth vaping.
Back in 2018, Altria — one of the country’s largest producers and marketers of cigarettes and tobacco — had acquired a 35% stake in Juul for $12.8 billion, ballooning the company’s valuation to an estimated $38 billion.
But, by 2023, 95% of its value had gone up in smoke, leading Altria to pull out.
Sagan said that exit, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
“The company was independent [again],” he told NYNext. “Today, it’s literally owned by the founders and early investors. I became the first large outside participant.”
The Juul2 is a bold bet in a crowded category.
The global smoking cessation market — which includes not just e-cigarettes but also gums, patches, lozenges and other replacement therapies — is valued at nearly $35 billion, per Research and Markets. In addition to Juul Labs, companies such as Reynolds American (Vuse), Imperial Brands (blu) and Altria (NJOY) are also pitching vaping products as a means to this end.
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But Sagan is optimistic.
“We’re all of the belief that Juul is a mission-driven company tackling the most important public health problem,” Sagan said. “That truth will reveal itself at some point in time.”
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