The longevity drink co-founded by David Beckham and serial builder Danny Yeung just secured a billion-dollar war chest from General Catalyst - as a loan against its own customers, not equity.
David Beckham, co-founder of IM8 // Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Most consumer brands scale by selling shares to buy growth. IM8 did the opposite. On July 14, 2026, the supplement startup co-founded by David Beckham and Danny Yeung secured $1 billion from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund - a facility that hands over cash without taking a single point of equity. The money finances up to 70% of what IM8 spends acquiring customers. General Catalyst gets repaid through a capped share of the revenue those customers generate. Once it recovers its money and hits the cap, every dollar after that flows back to IM8, permanently.
The structure matters because the economics underneath it are unusually clean. By Yeung's own account, every dollar IM8 has ever spent to win a customer has already returned $1.44 in gross profit. When your unit math looks like that, the constraint isn't discipline. It's cash. A brand that profitable on acquisition doesn't want to slow down - it wants a bigger tank.
IM8 launched in December 2024 with two flagship products: Daily Ultimate Essentials, a 90-ingredient nutrition foundation, and Daily Ultimate Longevity. Within eleven months it reached roughly $100 million in annualized revenue, which the company describes as the fastest ramp any premium supplement brand has recorded. By June 2026 it was booking about $17 million a month and shipping around 200,000 servings a day.
The brand itself began, fittingly, over a meal. Yeung met Beckham in London in June 2024. Nineteen months later, that conversation is a billion-dollar balance sheet line.
"The right question was never whether we were spending too much; it's whether we were spending enough."
Venture capital, in its classic form, is simple: money for stock. The Customer Value Fund breaks that trade. Instead of buying a slice of the company, General Catalyst buys a slice of future customer revenue - capped, time-bound, and then gone. It behaves more like growth debt than equity, but priced against the performance of specific customer cohorts.
For a founder, the appeal is obvious. Ownership stays intact. There's no board seat traded away, no down-round risk on the cap table, no dilution when the next flush of customers rolls in. The capital simply amplifies a marketing engine that already works.
IM8 isn't the first to use it. Grammarly pulled $1 billion from the same fund in May 2025. But a physical-product, subscription-supplement brand is a different animal from software, and General Catalyst's read was that IM8's numbers held up.
Funds: up to 70% of customer-acquisition spend.
Returns: a capped share of cohort revenue.
Equity taken: none.
After the cap: all further customer value returns to IM8.
"IM8 is a category-defining consumer health business, and the underlying cohort economics are among the strongest we've seen across the Customer Value Fund portfolio."
CEO of Prenetics, co-founder of IM8. He sold baseball cards at twelve, dropped out of high school at fifteen, and launched his first restaurant at twenty-four. In 2010 he moved to Hong Kong with a suitcase, built uBuyiBuy, sold it inside six months, and became Groupon's East Asia CEO.
He founded Prenetics in 2014 as a DNA-testing company, pivoted it to run 28 million COVID tests through the pandemic, took it public on Nasdaq in 2022, then turned toward consumer health.
Co-founder and equity holder - not a paid face. The distinction is the point. Beckham's stake ties his name to the outcome, not just the launch. His athlete's discipline maps neatly onto a product built around a single daily habit.
Inter Miami CF, the club he co-owns, holds an equity stake in IM8's parent company, threading the brand through his wider business world.
A 90-ingredient daily nutrition foundation meant to replace a cabinet full of separate pills with one routine.
The second flagship, aimed at the longevity crowd - the corner of wellness obsessed with aging well, not just feeling well.
Hydration is slated for Q4 2026 and premium gummies for Q1 2027, widening the daily-habit footprint.
The products are NSF Certified for Sport, non-GMO, vegan, and allergen-free - credentials that matter both to athletes and to the subscription customers who make the cohort math work. More than 50 million servings have shipped since launch.
IM8 fulfills an order roughly every 27 seconds.
General Catalyst wrote a $1B check for zero equity.
Grammarly used the same CVF structure for $1B in May 2025.
Daily Essentials packs 90 ingredients into one scoop.
Beckham's Inter Miami CF holds equity in the parent.
$400M+ in revenue is projected for full-year 2027.