The financing highlights IM8’s rapid ascent, coming only 19 months after the premium supplement brand entered the market.
“This deal is the best thing that’s ever happened to our R&D budget,” said Danny Yeung, CEO and co-founder of Prenetics, which is headquartered in Hong Kong.
The deal’s unconventional structure has made it one of the most talked-about financings in the supplement sector, shifting IM8’s focus from announcing the investment to explaining how the model will fuel its growth.
“Let me clarify the structure, because it’s genuinely novel,” Yeung said. “General Catalyst funds 70% of whatever we invest in marketing each month, in advance, and we fund the remaining 30% ourselves. The entire $1 billion is dedicated to growth, and that’s precisely the point: This structure exists so that growth capital and innovation capital never compete again.”
New economics
Unlike a traditional venture capitalist investment, where companies exchange equity for capital, IM8’s financing does not require the company to surrender an ownership stake.
Yeung said General Catalyst’s funding allows IM8 to preserve its own capital by covering marketing costs—freeing the company to invest in product development, clinical research and new product categories.
The funding will support digital performance marketing across every major platform, covering offline and connected-TV media, ambassador and athlete partnerships, brand activations and sponsorships, content production, and retention marketing. The investment will span IM8’s existing markets while supporting expansion into new geographies and product categories.
According to the brand’s statement in Yahoo Finance, the financing allows IM8 to invest more aggressively in brand and marketing—powered by its AI-driven acquisition engine.
“IM8 is the fastest-growing premium supplement brand ever recorded, and General Catalyst’s $1 billion commitment validates the strength of the cohort economics we’ve built,” Yeung said.
Although other supplement companies, including Grüns, Huel and Bloom Nutrition, have reached major funding or acquisition milestones, IM8 is the first supplement brand to secure this type of growth financing.
The economics are relatively low risk for General Catalyst, too, said Noah Voreades, CEO and co-founder of consulting firm Thrive Advisory Group. If the revenue from the marketing campaigns do not initially meet the financing terms, General Catalyst can walk away from the deal.
“It’s kind of like no harm, no foul to some degree for General Catalyst,” he said. “Let’s say out of the billion, they dole out $20 million up front. Say it just goes catastrophically wrong. While $20 million is not peanuts for a fund like General Catalyst, it’s still generally a small amount.”
IM8, however, has already reached $200 million in annualized revenue and has built a roster of brand ambassadors beyond Beckham including Giannis Antetokounmpo, Aryna Sabalenka, Ollie Bearman, Jay Shetty, Inter Miami, all holding equity in IM8.
Writing on LinkedIn, David Lasday, CEO of Global Athlete Equity, noted that once General Catalyst recovers its investment and hits the cap on any given cohort, every dollar those customers generate afterward flows entirely to IM8, with no fixed repayment schedule and no maturity date.
“General Catalyst isn’t betting on Beckham’s name recognition,” he added. “It’s betting on a repeatable, already-validated customer acquisition engine and structuring the entire deal so its return is tied directly to that engine’s performance rather than the brand’s overall equity value.”
Exploring acquisition?
For a supplement company, IM8 scaled quickly. Since its launch, it has shipped products to 43 countries, reaching a pace of 200,000 servings a day and more than 50 million servings delivered to date.
Most U.S.-based VMS brands typically grow and pursue exits within the United States rather than expanding globally at the outset, Voreades said.
“In the case of IM8, while they talk about being the fastest to revenue, part of that speed to this milestone could be driven by being in other countries immediately,” he noted. “Yes, their revenue is concentrated mostly in the United States, but imagine if Olipop, LiquidIV, Grüns, Nutrafol, Rho Nutrition went global from day one. They might have had the revenue trajectory given the massively larger customer total addressable market.”
As for the products in the market, IM8’s core offerings include its Daily Ultimate Essentials, an all-in-one nutrition powder with 90 ingredients to address energy, digestion, immunity and cognitive support, and Daily Ultimate Longevity, which is designed to target cellular health and the biological hallmarks of aging with NAD+ boosters, amino acids and senolytics.
In 2024, IM8, which is backed by a scientific team of researchers from the Mayo Clinic, Cedars-Sinai and NASA, partnered with the University of Oxford on a month-long space experiment, which included sending its Cell Rejuvenation Ingredients to the International Space Station to study accelerated aging and longevity.
That same year, IM8 began research on its Daily Ultimate Essentials, conducting a 12-week randomized controlled trial with the San Francisco Research Institute. According to participants who self-reported, 95% felt more energy, 85% felt better digestion, 80% slept better, and 75% noticed sharper focus when taking the supplement.
IM8’s next chapter will center on category expansion and clinical research, Yeung said, with the company recently announcing plans to enter the gummy market by first-quarter 2027.
“We reached a $200 million run-rate essentially on two hero products—the roadmap adds new formats and new need states, starting with hydration this year,” Yeung said.
IM8’s annualized run-rate, the financial metric used to project a company’s future performance, is expected to reach $300 million by the end of 2026 and surpass $400 million in 2027. Yeung said IM8’s ambition extends beyond becoming a billion-dollar global consumer health brand. It plans to improve the scientific standard for the category through increased clinical trials, additional certifications and more evidence to support its products.
The scale and speed of IM8’s growth naturally raise questions about its long-term path, including whether Prenetics could eventually pursue a sale of the brand. Yeung confirmed he has zero intention of selling.
“This is my fifth company and my last, and we’re building it for decades,” he said. “If you mean IM8 as an acquirer—we keep an open mind. One deliberate feature of this financing is that it preserves our balance sheet for exactly those strategic opportunities where cash or equity is the right tool. If a brand, a technology or a scientific capability accelerates the mission, we’re in a position to move. But our bar is high, and organic growth is working rather well at the moment."
