Mike Repole spent two decades turning drinks into billion-dollar exits for Coca-Cola. Impact Capital is where he does it again - this time as the buyer, backing snack brands, Tom Brady's wellness empire and a football league.
There is a version of the American business story where a founder builds one great company, sells it, and disappears into philanthropy and golf. Mike Repole has never been interested in that version. He co-founded Glaceau, the maker of Vitaminwater and Smartwater, and sold it to The Coca-Cola Company for roughly $4.1 billion. He co-founded BodyArmor, took it on directly against Gatorade, and sold that to Coca-Cola too - this time for $5.6 billion. Then, instead of stopping, he built a firm whose entire purpose is to do it again, and again, with other people's brands.
That firm is Impact Capital Private Equity, the investment arm of Driven Capital, Repole's single-family office in Orlando, Florida. It is small - a team of roughly a dozen - and it does not behave like a conventional buyout shop. It behaves like a founder with a checkbook and very firm opinions about your go-to-market. Its holdings already run an unusually wide range: a better-for-you granola bar brand, a billion-dollar performance-footwear company now tied to Tom Brady, a fast-growing supplement startup, and a professional spring football league.
Impact Capital takes controlling or significant stakes in consumer brands it believes have, in the firm's own framing, untapped growth potential - largely across food, beverage and wellness, and more recently sports and live entertainment. The distinguishing move is what happens after the check clears. Rather than relying on financial engineering, the firm embeds operators and applies the same brand-building and distribution playbook Repole used to turn two beverages into two of the largest brand acquisitions Coca-Cola has ever made.
It is a specific kind of edge. Most private equity competes on price, leverage and cost discipline. Impact Capital competes on the least teachable thing in consumer products: knowing how to get something onto more shelves and into more hands, and how to make people feel something when they buy it.
The clearest way to understand Impact Capital is to look at what it owns. In 2023 it took a majority stake in NOBULL, the performance-footwear and apparel brand. Then the deal got more interesting: Tom Brady merged his TB12 wellness business and his Brady Brand apparel line into NOBULL, becoming the company's second-largest shareholder behind Repole. A later fundraise reportedly valued the combined company near $1 billion, and Repole has described it as a wellness-and-lifestyle company rather than just a sneaker brand.
Also in 2023, the firm acquired a majority of Junkless Foods, a Michigan-based maker of better-for-you granola bars - the kind of unglamorous, real-shelf-space consumer business Repole has spent a career understanding. In 2026 Impact Capital joined a roughly $20 million Series B for Create Wellness, a New York startup selling vegan creatine in gummy and powder form, in a round led by Alliance Consumer Growth.
And then there is the outlier that isn't really an outlier. In 2025 Impact Capital took an ownership stake in the United Football League and assumed leadership of the league's business operations, joining a cap table that already included Fox, RedBird Capital, Dwayne Johnson and Dany Garcia. A food-and-beverage investor buying into spring football looks random for about five seconds - until you realize Repole does not see food, sneakers and football as different categories. He sees brands and audiences.
Impact Capital's edge is also a network. The firm is populated with people who have actually built consumer brands, many of them alumni of BodyArmor and the wider beverage world. Brent Hastie, a partner at the firm, is the former president of BodyArmor and holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard. Lindsay Schumacher, the firm's VP of Marketing, came up through BodyArmor Sports Nutrition and TEAM Enterprises. The pattern is deliberate: operators backing operators.
Impact Capital sits in a crowded but distinct corner of the market. Consumer-focused investors like Alliance Consumer Growth, VMG Partners, CAVU Consumer Partners and L Catterton chase the same emerging brands. What separates Repole's firm is less the deal flow than the founder-operator credibility behind it. When the person writing your term sheet has personally taken a brand from a startup to a multibillion-dollar acquisition - twice - the pitch is not just capital. It is a claim that he can do for your company what he already did for his own.
The business model reflects that. As a single-family office deploying Repole's own capital rather than a traditional fund raised from outside limited partners, Impact Capital can move on conviction, take concentrated positions, and hold with a longer horizon. The trade-off is scale: this is a boutique, not a mega-fund, and its bets are few and deliberate.
For anyone building a consumer brand, Impact Capital is worth studying not as an investor to court but as a thesis to internalize. Repole's entire career is a bet that brand and distribution beat almost everything - that the moat is rarely the formula and almost always how many places people can buy the thing and how they feel when they do. Vitaminwater proved it. BodyArmor proved it again, against an entrenched incumbent. The Impact Capital portfolio is the same bet, institutionalized: find good products that are one great operator away from becoming great brands, then be that operator.
Whether granola bars, creatine gummies, running shoes or a football league can all bend to one playbook is the open question. What is not in question is that the person asking it has run the play before, and knows exactly what winning looks like.