A water bottle with a flip-the-dial twist, run by a man who used to tackle people for a living.
Pick up a Cirkul bottle and you do something odd for a glass of water: you make a decision. A cartridge clicks into the lid, a small dial sets the intensity, and the water tastes like whatever you told it to. No powder. No spill. That tiny act of control is the entire company, and Garrett Waggoner has spent a decade making it feel inevitable.
Today he is co-founder and CEO of Cirkul, the Tampa beverage company that reached a $1 billion valuation in 2022 on a $70 million Series C. The operation now runs to roughly 800 people and about $378 million in annual revenue, with bottles and flavor cartridges stocked on national retail shelves. For a product that started as a way to stop ruining gym bags, that is a long way to travel.
The strange specific worth remembering is the dial. Cirkul did not win by inventing flavored water; flavored water is a crowded, $13.5-billion brawl run by conglomerates. It won by handing the customer a knob. You decide how strong. You decide which flavor. The bottle becomes a small daily ritual instead of a one-time purchase, and the cartridge keeps you coming back. Waggoner has compared the model to Keurig, the coffee machine that sold the brewer cheap and made its money on the pods. Same trick, applied to hydration.
Just because something doesn't exist, doesn't mean that it shouldn't. If you think something should exist, and you think you would use it, there's probably more folks out there on the planet that likely would as well.
That conviction was tested early and often, because Cirkul almost did not get made. When the founders went looking for a manufacturer to assemble their cartridges, nobody would take the job. So in 2018, as the product was launching at retail, Waggoner and co-founder Andy Gay rented a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in Tampa and put the things together themselves. What looked like desperation hardened into strategy. Waggoner estimates the company has since invested more than $100 million to improve and internalize its own processes, from flavor batching to shipping. The factory is the moat.
The OriginIt began with a mess on a locker-room floor.
Rewind to 2010 at Dartmouth College. Waggoner played safety for the Big Green and met Andy Gay as a teammate. The pair were studying for exams in the locker room when Waggoner tried to pour sports-drink powder into a narrow-mouth water bottle and, predictably, made a mess. The question that followed was simple and the company never stopped answering it.
What if you could just insert something in and drink, no messes, powders, or liquids?
On the field, Waggoner was no afterthought. He finished his career having played 42 games, more than any football player in Dartmouth history, and was named All-Ivy League First Team at defensive back two years running. He shared the John M. Manley '40 Award. Athletes who break a school's all-time appearance record do not usually pivot to flavor cartridges, which is part of what makes the story stick.
The bridge between safety and CEO ran through Canada. Waggoner played professional football in the CFL for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers while the Cirkul idea quietly grew. To keep the dream funded in the early years, he worked as a car valet in the offseason. The capital that seeded a billion-dollar company came, in part, from parking other people's cars. Eventually he retired from football to run the bottle full time.
The PhilosophySolve a real problem first. Build the cool thing second.
Ask Waggoner for advice and he refuses to hand you a formula. His top tip for younger founders is almost anti-advice: take every lesson from every successful operator and run it through your own lens, because what worked for one business can quietly sink another. The Cirkul playbook that he will own up to is plainer than it sounds. Chase a genuine problem rather than a clever gadget. Then obsess over the customer experience until it becomes a habit.
It is a worldview built on the field as much as in the boardroom. Cirkul's whole pitch is patience disguised as convenience: own the manufacturing, control the flavor, win the repeat purchase. Andy Gay's advice to his co-founder is shorter still. Stick to your guns. Between the two of them, that has held a $13.5-billion category at arm's length and carved out room for a bottle with a dial.
What makes Waggoner worth watching is not the valuation; valuations move. It is the refusal to outsource the hard part. Plenty of consumer brands chase a viral moment and let a contract manufacturer carry the weight. Cirkul did the opposite. It treated the boring middle of the business, the batching and the boxing and the shipping, as the thing worth getting obsessively right. The dial sells the bottle. The factory sells the company.
Cirkul by the numbers
Bars scaled relative to the $1B valuation. Figures from public reporting and provided company data.