IM8 hits $200M ARR in 18 months with David Beckham and a $1B General Catalyst growth commitment

Speaker 2: We have Danny Yeung.

Speaker 1: That is absolutely insane.

Speaker 2: This is like blowing Jordy's mind. Biggest update to a world model. Let's bring in Danny. He's the co founding partner and CEO. What's going How are you doing? We got questions for Thanks for

Speaker 7: having me on.

Speaker 2: We we before we even get to introductions, how many cups of coffee a day do you drink?

Speaker 7: I only drink I m eight.

Speaker 2: What? Oh, wow. Oh, yes. Of course.

Speaker 9: Oh, wow. Oil.

Speaker 2: There we go.

Speaker 1: But do you guys have caffeine in the product?

Speaker 7: There's no caffeine in the product. Zero caffeine.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay. So so you're

Speaker 2: just Two for two.

Speaker 1: Zero caffeine. Going through life. Yes. No caffeine.

Speaker 2: Tyler Cowen doesn't do coffee either. Yeah. Maybe maybe there's a secret second tier. There was a new study in the Wall Street Journal that said up to five cups of coffee a day is okay. People These are celebrating if they've already been fully addicted. But anyway, enough of that. Introduce yourself and the company, please.

Speaker 7: Sure. My name is Danny Yeung, CEO of Kinetics and iMATE. You know, we started the brand iMATE about nineteen months ago, and now we're the fastest growing supplement brand ever recorded in the industry. Of course, you may know David Beckham. Yeah. Yeah, no introduction. Yeah. I co founded iMATE with him nineteen months ago, it's been a crazy journey ever since. We hit a 100,000,000 ARR within eleven months. We hit 200,000,000 ARR within eighteen months.

Speaker 1: There we go. What stopped you from hitting a 100 within, let's say, six months?

Speaker 2: That's hilarious, but actually a good question. Wait, wait, yeah. What was the constraint? Was it Yeah.

Speaker 1: What was the constraint?

Speaker 2: Supply chain?

Speaker 1: Was it distribution? Products or figuring out Yeah. Advertising?

Speaker 7: No. It's just you have to scale, right? And then you can't scale so fast even in eleven months, you know, we're the fastest ever, right? Typically at a 100,000,000 for supplement brands.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: On average, it takes roughly three to five years to hit a 100,000,000. So for us to being able to do it in eleven months is, you know, quite amazing.

Speaker 1: What what would do? You do you remember what you were modeling for, like, where where you wanted to be after the first, let's say, twelve months?

Speaker 7: Yes. And the model was very different than reality, right? So I think our first model, full year revenue was approximately 30,000,000 USD, that was already quite high for a new brand out of the gate this very competitive category, right? So our first full year revenue, we ended up doing 60,000,000.

Speaker 9: Oh, wow.

Speaker 7: This year, we'll do well over 200,000,000 in our second year of full operations.

Speaker 1: Wow. Okay. So what like, David Beckham, I think of him as a very, like, global star. Did you as part of the growth, did you guys go global early? What did that strategy look like compared to, let's say, a traditional, like, US economy?

Speaker 7: 100%. Traditional DCZ company in The US, you're probably way to go global two, three, four, five years out, right? For us, day one global day one meant 31 countries shipping. So we did that from day one last year, and then so US is our number one market, Canada number two, UK number three, Australia number four, Singapore number five. Now we ship to 43 countries. We're delivering 200,000 servings daily. Now delivered 52,000,000 servings in the last nineteen months.

Speaker 1: Wow. Talk about the latest round. You raised a billion dollars, but what does that look like? Who participated? All that stuff.

Speaker 7: Sure. So not many people know. IMA is actually part of a public listed company, Prenetics, listed on the NASDAQ under the stock ticker PRE. And then so with that, again, the brand's so new, we've gotten a $1,000,000,000 growth commitment from

Speaker 2: Thank you. Congratulations.

Speaker 3: You Thank said you.

Speaker 1: Growth commitment from?

Speaker 7: General Catalyst.

Speaker 1: Right. And is their new is this their their program that helps basically finance customer acquisition?

Speaker 7: Correct. So it's from their CBF fund, and then so they typically work only with multi billion dollar companies, right? So they did this with Lemonade. Again, Lemonade was a public company as well in '23. Market cap was 1,000,000,000. Now, today, they're 5,000,000,000. They did this with Grammarly. They gave them billion dollars to scale up as well. So this only works if you have great retention cohort data, because what they're doing is they're underwriting the risk of predictable revenue in the future. So what they're doing is that, for example, for every dollar that we're spending on marketing, they're giving us 70% or 70¢. Yep. And based upon our gross profits, then we pay that back over, you know, the next, you know, two, three months. Yeah. They charge a percentage interest rate of roughly 3.5% if that payback period is under three months.

Speaker 1: Yep. I'm on the board of a of a company that is in that program as well. Amazing. And I was we had a board meeting last Thursday. I was in Europe, so it was like 2AM, but we we spent spent quite a lot of time going over all that data and the program cool. What percentage of I m eight does Prenetics own?

Speaker 7: 100%.

Speaker 1: Crazy. So you guys are at you guys are gonna do 200,000,000 this year or you're or you're projecting 200,000,000 sitting at a market cap of of 354,000,000. So

Speaker 7: Yeah. And we have roughly about 140,000,000 in cash. Yeah. Even without the general catalyst. So I think there's a big disconnect between private markets and public markets. And to be fair, you know, we had a lot of legacy in the past. We had diagnostics business, we grew very fast during COVID. Yeah, during COVID, we're doing 40,000 PCR tests. You know, post COVID, I had the opportunity to meet with David and then we got along really well. We're like, hey, what if we did something together? What would that look like? Then we recruited, yeah, some of the world's best doctors, scientists, and professors on board. And yeah, it's always been crazy.

Speaker 1: Very cool. Wow.

Speaker 2: Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show to break it down.