Portal° Thermaculture Is Building a Five-Metro Social Sauna Chain Without Outside Investors

Portal° Thermaculture, the contrast-therapy social club co-founded by Will Drescher, Rory MacMurdo, and John Drescher, now operates in four US cities with a fifth on the way. The company started as a Boulder pop-up on Sanitas Brewing’s back patio in January 2024. That pop-up burned down in early January 2025. Six weeks later, a Denver location opened. By the end of May, Minneapolis was running. Bozeman, Montana, opened March 17, 2026. Austin, Texas, at 115 Industrial Blvd in the St. Elmo Arts district, is opening this spring with two saunas, six individual cold plunge tubs, and a rooftop deck. That makes five metros in under two and a half years, all without a disclosed institutional investor.

Oakwell’s Las Vegas franchise deal and Pryes’ seasonal brewery saunas show two other ways operators are combining heat with the taproom business.

Portal° is building the category from the opposite end to Bathhouse’s $35 million raise and multi-city expansion plan announced May 8: Bathhouse with institutional capital and dense coastal metros, Portal° with personal capital and outdoor-recreation cities where people already spend weekends getting sore.

A horse trailer, a Grizzly cooler, and a trip to Moab

Will Drescher’s introduction to thermaculture began behind a strip mall in Minneapolis. As he told Boulder Weekly in August 2024: “The cold plunge was a 200-gallon white Grizzly cooler, and the sauna was a horse trailer.” The DIY setup, he said, eventually became a club called Embrace North, a grassroots operation that the Star Tribune reported in 2023 had grown to roughly 900 members before the city of Minneapolis ordered it closed for operating without permits. Drescher was a regular, not a founder, and it was there that his friendship with Rory MacMurdo took off.

The Portal° concept came into focus during a trip to the desert. “We were actually up in Moab, and we were listening to the Khruangbin album Mordechai,” Drescher told Boulder Weekly. “And we were like, ‘What if we just made Embrace North, but it sounded and looked like this?’ That’s Portal.”

They built their first pop-up in Boulder in January 2024, on the back patio of Sanitas Brewing at 3550 Frontier Avenue. The Westword profiled the venture in March 2024, when Drescher and MacMurdo were the only two names on the marquee. (John Drescher, Will’s brother, later joined as a co-founder; he was the primary spokesperson when the Minneapolis location opened, as reported by Mpls.St.Paul Magazine in July 2025.)

The Boulder pop-up burned down in early January 2025. Six weeks later, on February 15, a new Portal° location opened in Denver’s LoHi neighborhood behind the Nurture Wellcare Marketplace. Rooster Magazine described it as “a phoenix from the ashes.” A new Boulder location at 4949 Broadway later reopened in the North Boulder Arts District.

Pop-ups first, storefronts later

Portal°’s first two locations were outdoor pop-ups with almost no overhead. As Rooster reported, the Denver LoHi club has “very little overhead: two saunas, three cold plunges, a shower, a small front office, two changing rooms, some lockers and a seating area. And by little overhead I also mean no roof. It’s all outdoors.” “You can’t really create a movement of building $3 to $5 million bathhouses,” he told Rooster. “You can, but you need to go get money from venture capital.” His alternative: “People need a dive bar that doesn’t serve alcohol.”

Mpls.St.Paul Magazine called Minneapolis, which opened at the end of May 2025, “Portal’s first official brick-and-mortar location,” noting that “the team has previously run pop-up locations in Boulder and Denver.” The club occupies a converted former Jiffy Lube on the northwest side of Bde Maka Ska, with two electric saunas, one wood-burning sauna, and a 10-by-20-foot communal cold plunge pool held at 38 degrees. The cold plunge alone was a project: originally slated for a March opening, the timeline slipped to the end of May partly because the team ordered a chiller “traditionally used for marine mammal habitats, like penguin and beluga whale tanks,” as John Drescher told the magazine.

Boulder, Denver, Bozeman (population roughly 58,000), Minneapolis, Austin: these are outdoor-recreation markets where the customer base already understands physical discomfort as recreation. Nobody in Bozeman needs to be convinced that getting cold on purpose might feel good. In Manhattan or Miami, the pitch has to start with category education.

Pricing is built for frequent visits. A single-session credit costs $65 and works at any Portal° club, with bulk packs bringing the per-visit cost down to $60 (four credits) or $55 (eight credits). Monthly memberships start at $99 for four credits across all locations, while single-location unlimited plans run $129 in Denver and Boulder, $179 in Minneapolis. At $129 per month, a daily visitor in Denver pays about $4.30 per session, closer to gym pricing than spa pricing.

How they build: BW Sauna Co.

Portal°’s Minneapolis hot rooms were built by BW Sauna Co. out of Duluth, Minnesota. Mpls.St.Paul Magazine described the saunas as “custom” builds by BW. BW’s own site says clear cedar lines every BW hot room, with thermally modified wood offered as an exterior finish, and its site lists IKI, Kuuma, Homecraft (electric) and Torch (gas) as its stove makers. Mpls.St.Paul Magazine reported that the Minneapolis club runs two electric saunas and one wood-burning sauna.

Portal° specified custom-built hot rooms from the start, working with a regional sauna builder that knows how to handle a commercial duty cycle.

A visit to the Minneapolis club

SaunaNews has visited Portal°’s Minneapolis location at West Maka Ska.

The converted Jiffy Lube is a small space. It has speed dryers for swimwear, which most operators skip, and on the evening of the visit jazz played softly enough to hold a conversation. It felt more like a neighborhood hangout than a spa. The crowd was social, relaxed, and mixed: couples, friend groups, a few solo regulars who clearly knew the staff.

Portal° frequently offers free or discounted first sessions. In their first month at Minneapolis, the team sold more than 400 memberships, according to Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

Parking at the Minneapolis location is tight. West Maka Ska is a residential neighborhood, onsite parking is limited, and nearby street parking has been further constrained by construction on the METRO Green Line Lake Street station. Plan to walk or bike.

Portal° vs. Bathhouse: two playbooks, one category

Portal°’s Austin announcement came alongside Bathhouse’s $35 million raise from Imaginary Ventures (the fashion-and-consumer VC behind Glossier). Bathhouse is targeting multiple dense metros with a premium experience and institutional backing. Portal° is founder-funded, targeting outdoor-recreation cities with a model that started as outdoor pop-ups and is only now graduating to permanent storefronts.

Bathhouse has institutional capital, premium pricing, and plans for cities like Los Angeles (where it is taking over the former Amoeba Records space on Sunset Boulevard), Chicago, and Nashville. Portal° has no disclosed outside investors, single-club unlimited memberships from $129 a month, and is threading through markets where the customer base skews toward outdoor athletes who already own a lot of fleece. Sauna House, now franchising, represents a third model, while Othership in Toronto has built the social-sauna-as-nightlife variant.

Both sell repeatable ritual rather than a one-time spa visit. The open question is whether the founder-led, outdoor-rec-city playbook can hold its own as the segment attracts institutional capital, or whether Drescher and MacMurdo end up selling that script to someone with deeper pockets. Drescher, for his part, seems uninterested in the venture path: “You can’t really create a movement of building $3 to $5 million bathhouses.”