Technology
Liquid Death is just one of many VC-backed beverage startups poised to disrupt the Coca-Cola and Pepsi market
March 11 carbonated the startup announced that it had raised $67 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion and had sales of $263 million in 2023. Did you guess that this startup is Liquid Death, a canned water company?
Liquid Death has now raised over $267 million in enterprise funding, despite being in a category that does not interest many investors. Beverages is a difficult industry for VCs since it is capital-intensive; requires a knack for choosing firms that may sell well on retail shelves or otherwise directly to the consumer; and inspires regular customers, not just once.
Science Ventures managing director Michael Jones told TechCrunch that his company is not focused on venturing into the beverage sector but supports Liquid Death because of its potential to disrupt legacy players like Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
“We were in the market for culturally relevant companies with better-for-you products that were redefining a tired and old category,” Jones said. His investment team hailed Liquid Death as an “extremely disruptive brand.”
Cutting the mousse
Some of these recent venture-backed beverage startups are hoping to upend the industry by creating recent beverage categories. This is often reminiscent of what tech firms do, said Dan Buckstaff, chief marketing officer at retail data firm Spins.
“You might think you can’t squeeze another category in here, and instead you approach it differently,” Buckstaff said. “You take inspiration from others, or maybe there’s new technology that allows you to do that, or data that actually leads to companies that can generate hundreds of millions in ARR.”
He said Liquid Death drew on beer marketing and shelf placement to achieve success not only on food market shelves, but additionally at events, in bars and restaurants and even at conferences. (Liquid Death declined to comment). In fact, at the recent Expo West consumer goods conference, Buckstaff hosted the Liquid Death event and his room looked like “we were at a real party.”
He took part in an off-the-cuff survey that asked participants how often they ordered beer or wine to appear sociable. Half of them said yes. This made him realize how huge the market may very well be for firms like Liquid Death, whose brand names and packaging are inspired by alcohol but provide a healthier alternative.
“For these people, non-alcoholic brands are well positioned for this and have great potential,” Buckstaff said. “And not only at social events, but just at home – people relax and drink beer. Instead, there are now many alternatives that contain mood-enhancing or relaxing agents.”
Not Beer is one of those taking a nod from these early firms. Founder Dillon Dandurand is launching a brand new company that may launch a brand of premium sparkling water on April 9. He said his brand was created with consumers selecting to drink less alcohol in mind.
“Gen Z is drinking less than any generation before them,” he said. “These people still want to have an excellent time, but they realize they haven’t got to drink alcohol to have an excellent time, and they haven’t got to drink that much alcohol to have an excellent time. In fact, getting a pleasant buzz but not getting wasted is probably more enjoyable.
However, resisting the noise could be difficult. Consumers care about two features that, according to Dandurand, give a brand a likelihood to stand out from the competition: taste and brand.
With so many options, brands need to communicate why their drink is higher than an identical drink in a given category, in addition to explain why a specific drink is higher than a drink in one other category.
“It’s an uphill battle,” Dandurand said.
Who else jumps out?
Water is not the only category attracting startups and VC funds, often from celebrity angel investors. Drinks containing vitamins, minerals, supplements and plant ingredients are also extremely popular.
For example, firms like Odyssey, which raised $6 million in enterprise capital in February from a bunch of investors that features Richard Laver of Rocket Beverage Group. The company adds lion’s mane and cordyceps mushrooms, known for his or her cognitive clarity and increased energy effects, to their drinks.
Other beverage startups attracting VC dollars include better-for-you soda startups like Olipop (backed by Finn Capital Partners, Melitas Ventures and celebrity angels like Camila Cabello) and Poppi, backed by Electric Feel Ventures, partners and Rocana Ventures angels. Each has raised greater than $50 million in enterprise funding. Healthy lemonade alternative Lemon Perfect has raised greater than $70 million in money from an extended list of VC firms, athletes and celebrities like Beyoncé.
Poppi – which has CAVU Consumer Partners and a roster of celebrity investors corresponding to Chainsmokers’ Russell Westbrook, Olivia Munn and Nicole Scherzinger – has captured about 19% of the drinks market since launching about 4 years ago. Forbes reports i.e. 1.5x greater than Coca-Cola. It also became the eleventh fastest-growing beverage brand last month, beating out brands corresponding to Monster Energy, Gatorade and Liquid Death.
The brand is successful by “marketing strategically to become part of the culture, with an active and loyal following” and “filling a gap in the industry by providing a delicious, better-for-you option,” Poppi CEO Chris Hall told TechCrunch via email.
VCs are chasing some of the category’s hit phrases. Coca-Cola bought celebrity-sponsored coconut water BodyArmor for $5.6 billion in 2021. BodyArmor raised $36 million in enterprise capital. In 2016, Bai, a maker of antioxidant drinks, sold the company to Dr Pepper Snapple Group for $1.7 billion after raising just over $10 million in enterprise capital. There are also smaller transactions. In April 2023, NextFoods acquired tart cherry drink Cheribundi for an undisclosed amount following a $15 million investment round in 2020 led by Emil Capital Partners, Food diving reported.
While these startups make great acquisition targets because legacy firms often prefer to buy somewhat than develop their very own recent products, some can do well in the public market, said Alex Malamatinas, founder and managing partner at food and beverage-focused Melitas Ventures.
“Of course, what is happening in technology and artificial intelligence is amazing, (but) at the end of the day everyone has to eat and drink every day, these are very large markets with significant TAM,” Malamatinas said. “Despite everything that’s going on, Monster beverage stocks are the best performers, not technology stocks.”
That’s a bit of hyperbole. Over the last 12 months, Monster is up about 16% to reach a good market capitalization of $63 billion, while the most respected firms in the world are Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia, each price multi-trillions of dollars. However, the statement that its market capitalization is higher than many tech firms is correct. For example, only 7 out of 100 firms on Bessemer Cloud Index are more beneficial.
A brand new innovation cycle for beverages
Buckstaff also noted that the largest food industry trade show, Expo West, is booming with more recent exhibitors. “This leads me to believe that we may have entered a new cycle of innovation,” he said.
Jeff Klineman, editor-in-chief of food and beverage media company BevNET, definitely thinks so. Beverage startups remain resilient despite a tougher fundraising market is a story of “haves and have-nots,” Klineman told TechCrunch by email.
“Over the past few years, funds have had more difficulty raising funds, strategic departments have put acquisition plans on hold and lending has been tighter,” Klineman said. “CPG funds are being implemented more slowly, and there is more competition for brands that are actually growing and doing well.”
However, beverage startups are also struggling to raise funds in the VC touch environment. For those that have not hit the “sweet spot” of repeat purchasers, who don’t see the channel growing or who show a path to profitability, the market is tough, Klineman said.
For investors, determining which brands will endure and that are simply fads is difficult, Malamatinas said. He cited the CBD drink trend from a number of years ago, which briefly flared up but has since been much quieter. The company avoided them, he said, probably fortunately, as did studies on the effectiveness of low-dose CBD drinks mixed.
“There will be some important events in the coming years,” Malamatinas said. “I think the main reason people are afraid of this space is that it requires a certain level of expertise. We have experienced operators. There is a certain level of knowledge and skill that allows these businesses to scale.”
For investors willing to put in the work and time to find brands that last, this category is likely to yield strong returns. It worked with Bai. Olipop and Liquid Death seem to be on the right track. Now let’s examine who will likely be next.
Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold a complete of two corporations for billions of dollars. Now he plans to start out delivering takeaway food Wonder made public in a couple of years, at an ambitious valuation of $40 billion.
We recently spoke in person with Lore in New York about Wonder and its ultimate goal of constructing meal planning easier, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophy. Below is a part of what he said on the topic, flippantly edited for length and clarity.
Lore on the so-called founder modewhere founders and CEOs actively engage not only with their direct reports, but in addition with “skip level” employees to make sure that small challenges don’t grow to be big ones (Brian Chesky works this fashion, as does Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, amongst others):
Yes, I didn’t just like the founding mode because I operate in a different way. I focus very much on the concepts of vision, capital and people. We meet weekly with the leadership team and spend two hours every week on the core elements of vision, strategy, organizational structure, capital plan, our performance management systems, compensation systems, behaviors and values - akin to: things you’re thinking that are already set.
You think, “Oh, yeah, we’ve done certain behaviors before. We have already established the values. We dealt with performance management. We have our strategy.” But as you grow and develop quickly, it’s amazing how much it evolves over time, and you must sustain with it… and just speak about it and speak about it.
When everyone is fully aligned and you have got really good people, you simply allow them to do it; I do not have to get entangled in any respect. So I won’t go into the small print of what people do, so long as they know the nuances of the strategy and vision. When you connect that together with your team and they achieve that with their very own team, everyone is moving in the correct direction.
What Lore thinks about hiring the correct people:
I actually, really care about hiring rock stars. That is, one and all (I hire). I used to think you could possibly interview someone and inside an hour resolve whether or not they were a rock star. I actually thought so, and I believe other people think so too.
It’s not possible. I’ve employed hundreds of individuals. You cannot tell in an hour-long interview whether someone is a rock star, and it’s normal to get honeyed. Someone talks about a great game, sounds good, says the correct things, has the correct experience, and then it doesn’t work out and you wonder why.
I began going back to resumes and attempting to draw correlations, and I discovered that there was a definite pattern that superstar resumes had that distinguished them from non-superstar resumes. This doesn’t suggest that somebody who doesn’t have a superstar resume cannot be a superstar. I miss these people, it’s okay. But after I see someone with a superstar resume, they’re almost all the time a superstar. When I interview them, I already know that I would like to rent them, and it’s more about ensuring that I’m not missing anything from a behavioral, cultural, or values standpoint – we would like it to be compatible.
However, your resume must show a demonstrable level of success in each position you have got worked in. This means multiple promotions. This means staying with the corporate long enough to advance, and leaving and moving from one company to a different is a giant step. Superstars don’t move sideways. They don’t move from a great company to a bad one because bad corporations must pay more to draw people, so sometimes they shake loose individuals who should not that good, who just need to go for the cash.
But you discover someone who’s (at the highest) 5% and you take a look at their CV and it’s like: boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and then a giant jump… promotion, promotion, big jump . When I get a resume that shows a visual level of success, I take it and pay them what they need. It’s very essential for me to get this superstar there. And you are constructing an organization of superstars.
You have to have a correct performance management system in place in order that they know exactly what they should do to get to the following level. Because superstars are very motivated. They need to know what they should do to get to the following level, especially Generation Z. They need to know and get promoted every six months.
Finally, Lore talks about his belief that taking more risks is the solution to secure a startup’s future, even when this approach could seem counterintuitive to many:
People all the time underestimate the risk of the establishment and overestimate the risk of introducing change. I see it over and all over again.
If you have got a life-threatening disease and the doctor says, “You have six months to live,” at that time you may go on a trial drug or anything, even when it’s extremely dangerous (it should look good). Basically, you are trying to take a risk to avoid inevitable death.
If you are super healthy and every thing’s going great and someone says, “Take this experimental drug; it can make you live longer” (many individuals will say), “You know what? It’s too dangerous. I’m really healthy. I don’t desire to die from this drug.”
However, startups are very different from large corporations. When you’re employed at a big company like Walmart (whose US e-commerce business Lore tracked selling is certainly one of his corporations), it’s about incremental improvement. There is no incentive to take risks.
As a startup founder, you’ll likely die. Every day that you just live and do that startup, there is a risk that you’re going to die. The probability is 80% and only a 20% likelihood it should actually work. So you have got to take this into consideration when making decisions. You must search for opportunities to take risks to cut back your risk of death. The establishment is the worst thing you may do. Doing nothing is the most important risk you may take.
The Australian government has withdrawn a bill that might have imposed penalties on online platforms as much as 5 percent their global income in the event that they fail to stop the spread of disinformation.
The bill, backed by the Labor government, would enable the Australian Communications and Media Authority to create enforceable rules on disinformation on digital platforms.
IN statementCommunications Minister Michelle Rowland said the bill would “provide an unprecedented level of transparency, holding big tech accountable for its systems and processes to prevent and prevent the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation online.”
However, she said that “based on public statements and conversations with senators, it is clear that there is no way this proposal could be passed through the Senate.”
When a revised version of the bill was introduced in September, Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), criticized it in a one-word post: “Fascists.”
Shadow communications minister David Coleman was a vocal opponent of the bill, arguing it could encourage platforms to suppress free speech to avoid penalties. Because the bill seems dead now, Coleman sent that it was a “shocking attack on free speech that betrayed our democracy” and called on the Prime Minister to “rule out any future version of this legislation”.
Meanwhile, Rowland in his statement called on Parliament to support “other proposals to strengthen democratic institutions and keep Australians safe online”, including laws to combat deepfakes, enforcement of “truth in political advertising during elections” and regulation of artificial intelligence .
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can be moving forward with a plan to ban children under 16 from using social media.
Welcome back to the week in review. This week, we take a look at how the Department of Justice ordered Google to sell Chrome to break its monopoly, whether OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times, and the way artificial intelligence corporations are exploiting TikTok for research purposes. Let’s do it.
The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should get rid of its Chrome browser to help break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google is an illegal monopoly for abusing its power within the search industry, and the Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome poses a “significant challenge” to pursuing countermeasures aimed toward establishing a competitive search engine market.
Anthropic raised a further $4 billion from Amazon and agreed to make Amazon Web Services the first training site for its flagship generative artificial intelligence models. Anthropic can be working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’s chip manufacturing division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, custom AWS chips for training artificial intelligence models. Amazon’s recent money injection brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion.
OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in The New York Times and Daily News’ copyright lawsuit, say the publisher’s lawyers. As part of the lawsuit, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so the lawyer could seek for copyrighted content in its AI training kits. However, within the letter, lawyers for the publishers claim that OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one of the virtual machines.
News
Kim Kardashian meets Optimus: The fashion mogul had hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal humanoid robot. In videos posted to X, Kardashian encourages Optimus to make a heart out of his hand, dance like he’s at a luau and play rock, paper, scissors. Read more
Oura’s valuation exceeds $5 billion: The smart ring maker has received a $75 million investment from glucose device maker Dexcom. The investment, which constitutes Oura’s Series D financing round, raises the corporate’s valuation to over $5 billion. Read more
Let’s organize a celebration for Partiful: The customizable event planning app challenges legacy solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events, is a favourite amongst Gen Z users, and was just named a top app of 2024 by Google. Read more
Talk to me in your language: Microsoft will soon allow Teams users to clone their voices so that they can talk to others in up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Read more
Hackers attack Andrew Tate: According to The Daily Dot, hackers breached a web-based course founded by an influencer and self-confessed misogynist, exposing data on nearly 800,000 users. Tate is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on sex trafficking and rape charges. Read more
What makes a bank a bank? The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ruled that each one digital services that handle significant volumes of transactions needs to be subject to bank-style supervision, which could impact Apple Pay, Cash App, Google Pay, PayPal and Venmo. Read more
A more conversational Siri: According to sources cited by Bloomberg, Apple is developing a new edition of Siri based on advanced multilingual models in an attempt to meet up with more natural-sounding competitors comparable to Google Gemini Live. Read more
Making Money With TikTok Brains: Several AI-powered research tools are taking advantage of the “PDF to Brainrot” trend, during which the text of an uploaded document is read in a monotone voice against a backdrop of “weirdly satisfying” vertical videos like Subway Surfers gameplay. Read more
Threads attacks Bluesky: As Bluesky’s user base surpasses 20 million, Instagram Threads has begun rolling out a brand new feature called custom feeds to capitalize on user demand for more personalization. Read more
ChatGPT within the classroom: OpenAI has released a free online course to help elementary and middle school teachers find out how to introduce ChatGPT into their classrooms. However, some educators are concerned about this technology and its potential for error. Read more
Do we want one other day by day word game? Normally I’m an evangelist for word games and crosswords, but I feel like we’re quickly approaching market saturation. Netflix has launched a brand new day by day word puzzle game in partnership with TED called TED Tumblewords. Read more
Analysis
Please don’t send X-ray images to the chatbot: People often turn to generative AI chatbots to ask questions on their health concerns and higher understand their health. Since October, X users have been encouraged to upload their X-rays, MRIs and PET scans to the AI-powered chatbot, Grok, to help interpret the outcomes. Medical data is a special category subject to federal protections that, usually, only you may circumvent. But simply because you may does not imply you need to. As Zack Whittaker writes, it’s price remembering that what goes on the Internet never leaves it. Read more
Mother of woman shot by Alec Baldwin condemns ‘Rust’ actor for ‘unfairly profiting’ from daughter’s death
Dune: Prophecy discovered a weakness in the Dune movies’ greatest strength
NBA Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo will be posthumously honored by the Atlanta Hawks
Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode’, bad hiring and why avoiding risk is deadly
Washington’s power has modified. Here’s how the ACA could change
CEO of 360WiSE Launches Mentorship Program in Overtown Miami FL
The Importance of Owning Your Distribution Media Platform
U.S.-Africa Chamber of Commerce Appoints Robert Alexander of 360WiseMedia as Board Director
360Wise Media and McDonald’s NY Tri-State Owner Operators Celebrate Success of “Faces of Black History” Campaign with Over 2 Million Event Visits
Another lawsuit accuses Google of bias against Black minority employees
VAGINA is not a bad word says Dr. Jackie
How A Young Black Woman Launched Her Own Athletic Shoe Company
Saweetie Accused of Colorism in Resurfaced Video | Grio Top 3
Fighting for Equity with CEO & Co-Founder of Kanarys, Mandy Price #SistersInc
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