G.O.A.T. Fuel, the mushroom-enhanced energy drink brand backed by three-time Super Bowl champion Jerry Rice, announced this week it has closed a $5 million seed funding round co-led by venture firms Stage 1 Fund and Morrison Seger Venture Capital Partners.
Founded in 2020 by CEO Jaqui Rice Gold, Rice’s daughter, and her husband and chief brand officer Trevion Gold, G.O.A.T. Fuel produces a line of 12 oz. canned, zero sugar energy drinks made with cordyceps mushrooms, electrolytes, BCAAs and 200 mg of natural caffeine. The brand offers eight flavors and is sold in over 10,000 retail accounts nationwide, including about 600 Walmart and 700 Publix stores.
According to Gold, she and her husband came up with the idea for a healthier energy drink made with adaptogenic mushrooms in 2019, when both the performance energy category and functional mushrooms were gaining traction in the market.
“My background is not in beverage, I essentially was the consumer who was newly starting to drink energy drinks at the gym,” Gold told BevNET yesterday. “These better-for-you drinks were interesting to me and my husband, but some of the ingredients didn’t make us feel that great … we felt that there was an opportunity to really create a new formulation that was innovative, and that utilized an ingredient that we hadn’t seen in the marketplace before.”
Gold quickly involved her father, a former San Francisco 49ers wide receiver and 1988 Super Bowl MVP, whom she described as a “health nut.”
In addition to his own support – Gold said her father is “150% involved” in the business operations and regularly fields sales calls among other duties – Rice was able to tap into his broad network of sports personalities to help Gold raise over $7 million in funding from individual angel investors, including former 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. and Minnesota Timberwolves owner Marc Lore.
With the new round of funding, Gold said the brand is preparing to scale the business nationwide. Since launching DTC in 2020, G.O.A.T. Fuel has gone from under $1 million in annual sales to eight figures in revenue, Gold said, and the company projects revenue to triple year-over-year.
The company now has 20 full time employees and Gold said the financing will go towards expanding the sales team and to bring in seasoned operations executives to help grow the business.
“We’ve been nimble up until this point, and we’re really looking forward to seeing the company grow and expand,” she said.
Currently, G.O.A.T. Fuel is serviced through a network of DSD distributors and has recently added new accounts such as H-E-B in Texas. The brand is also in accounts like Safeway and Lucky’s in California.
Although G.O.A.T. Fuel had already raised significant funding through angels, she said the addition of institutional investors will help open more doors for the brand as it looks to break into new markets.
“It’s essentially for us a catalyst for that [growth] process and it was the time to do it with the traction we have and the run rate that we’re getting as we continue to scale,” she said. “We didn’t want to embark on this journey prematurely. We wanted to make sure even from a valuation standpoint that we all felt comfortable with the starting point.”
Looking ahead, however, Gold acknowledged there’s more competition in the energy set today than when she conceived the business in 2019, when Bang was the leading brand in the performance subset. Since then, better-for-you brands like Celsius, C4, and Ghost have experienced significant growth by partnering with strategics.
However, Gold said the brand’s use of adaptogenic mushrooms has been a strong differentiator for the brand. When G.O.A.T. Fuel launched online only in 2020, she said 49% of the brand’s consumers – primarily Gen Z and millennials – were aware of cordyceps and the benefits of mushrooms. Much like performance energy, mushrooms as both a standalone food and an ingredient have grown their mainstream popularity over the past four years; Grand View Research reported in March that the global adaptogenic mushroom market is expected to reach $26.6 billion at a CAGR of 10.8% between 2023 and 2030.
As well, G.O.A.T. Fuel’s connection to the sports world has also been valuable. Beyond Rice’s involvement, the brand is also now the official energy drink of the Los Angeles Lakers and Gold said the focus on sports – down to the brand name – will continue to be a key part of maintaining its momentum.
“Early on, we were the first to include the adaptogen mushrooms in an RTD energy drink,” she said. “I think by getting a head start in that space, we definitely have an advantage.”