David Beckham’s health drink startup IM8 takes $1B from General Catalyst’s unusual CVF fund
In Brief David Beckham’s startup IM8 has taken on $1 billion in funding from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), the company announced on Tuesday
In Brief David Beckham’s startup IM8 has taken on $1 billion in funding from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), the company announced on Tuesday. CVF doesn’t make standard venture equity investments, but offers what are essentially loans with some non-traditional repayment terms. Startups funded by CVF repay the loan amount along with a fixed, capped the percentage of revenue they generate. As such, GC isn’t buying stock, and won’t have an ownership stake in IM8.
Likewise, the startup’s ownership will not be diluted. As GC previously told TechCrunch, this is an option for startups that have predictable revenue streams and a plan for how more capital will supercharge their growth. IM8 was co-founded by CEO Danny Yeung, a self-described high-school dropout who founded a health company called Prenetics that went public in 2022. From there he landed in the kinds of circles where he found himself having dinner with David Beckham.
That dinner led to IM8, a subsidiary owned by Prenetics that sells a vitamin drink stuffed with compounds linked to longevity that range from açai fruit extract to Coenzyme Q10. Customers buy the drink via subscriptions. The loan is structured to finance up to 70% of IM8’s customer acquisition costs and, in return, GC receives a capped share of what it calls “reference income.” That’s defined as the revenue generated from those customers “multiplied by a fixed gross-margin assumption.” Once GC has recovered its investment and hits its cap on the revenue share, all subsequent revenue from those customers will go to Prenetics.
As we previously reported, Grammerly also took $1 billion from GC’s CVF in May 2025, just prior to acquiring Superhuman.
The BriefWire