The Ryl Company, maker of functional canned beverage brand Ryl Tea, has closed a $15 million funding round as it looks to accelerate into “hyper-growth” and increase its retail footprint 4x this year.
Founded in 2022 by former OWYN executive Blodin Ukella, who serves as the brand’s CEO, Ryl Tea ended 2024 with distribution in around 10,000 doors nationwide and 39 full time employees. With this latest funding round – which follows a $7.5 million Series A last year – the company now projects it will be sold in roughly 40,000 accounts with around 100 employees by the end of the year.
“Everything we do is extremely growth equity focused when it comes to financial raises,” Ukella told BevNET today.
The round included financing from existing investors, including country music star Morgan Wallen, Cam Fordham of marketing agency Get Engaged Media, Austin Neal of Sticks Management and Seth England of Big Loud Records, among others.
The brand’s expansion plans have grown more ambitious as Ryl has built out a national DSD network that includes major Northeast distributors Polar Beverage and Big Geyser in New York.
In addition to an existing presence in major retail chains like Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, Costco, Publix, H-E-B, Meijer and 7-Eleven, Ukella said that the strength of Ryl’s DSD fleet will allow it to go deeper in all of its key channels, including convenience stores and independents alongside conventional, mass and club accounts.
“We’ve had an incredible reset season, meaning we picked up everything that we anticipated to pick up and more,” Ukella said. “So we feel really, really strongly that we’ll be able to comfortably hit our distribution growth plans by the end of this year without a doubt.”
Much of the hiring that the company intends to do will be focused on sales positions to support the larger footprint, as well as operations rolls, he added.
Ryl’s expansion has been a bright spot in a tea category that some investors and analysts have lamented as a sleepy set lacking major innovation. Ready-to-drink tea sales in U.S. retail, MULO plus c-store, were down 2.8% in the 52-weeks ending December 29, according to market research firm Circana.
But brands like Liquid Death (+59.1%) and yerba mate leader Guayakí (+23.3%) have maintained strong growth as tea leaders slide. Ryl, meanwhile, is emerging as part of a vanguard of startups like Just Ice Tea, Halfday and St. James, which are looking to make their name in the mainstream with better-for-you positioning.
According to Ukella, a deal like PepsiCo’s recent $1.95 billion acquisition of Poppi is a validating moment for his company. Although Poppi, as a CSD brand, is not a direct competitor, he said it reflects surging interest in better-for-you products
“You’ve got to remember tea is a multi-billion dollar space, so even if you come down one or two basis points, you’re still talking about billions of dollars worth of volume,” he said.
“The one thing that does become a hurdle when you have a category as large as tea, that’s sort of flat in terms of overall legacy dollar growth, is assortment decisions are made based on category trend points. So what’s fascinating about what a brand like Ryl Tea is doing right now, and really any emerging tea, is we are reigniting the flame for the category assortment decisions that are going to be made here for 2025 and beyond.”
Ryl Tea’s new funding is also a positive sign for overall CPG investment.
Total investments grew 83% quarter-over-quarter between Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, despite being down year-over-year, according to data from The Food and Beverage Investment Database (FABID). However, non-alcoholic ready-to-drink beverages raising rounds in the $10 million to $50 million range have “held pretty stable over the past few years,” according to FABID’s Ryan Williams.
“For Ryl, I think the Halo of Blodin having been part of the formative years of OWYN, which had a successful exit, and also being in a category that, while large, hasn’t seen newer brands really accelerate, gives me little surprise to see investors getting behind it,” Williams told BevNET in an email.
Ukella, however, is quick to point to the strength of Ryl’s entire team, notably chairman Leigh Feuerstein, as well as Wallen, who Ukella called a “full partner” in the business whose team has helped open doors for Ryl to appear at music festivals.
“What we’ve really been fascinated with is the impact that Morgan has been able to make alongside us as a business operator,” Ukella said. “So much of the stuff that we get to do that’s event focused is because his team, or him directly, has direct access to things like that.”
Looking ahead, Ukella said that Ryl will work to increase its marketing efforts this year as well and is also developing limited time offering flavors for the line.
With economic uncertainty ahead for all CPG brands, Ukella was also confident that the company was set up well to deal with headwinds such as unexpected tariffs. While the company does source at least some of his teas internationally (he declined to delve into details on Ryl’s supply chain), he said the company has been “very safeguarded” and “proactive” in fortifying its supply and managing costs.
“We always know that no matter what, there can always be something that can throw you off from an operational capability standpoint and an economic structure standpoint,” he said. “So, we’ve been fortunate, and we plan to continue to be fortunate.”