David Beckham’s health drink brand got some big news today. Or rather its parent company did.
IM8 raised $1 billion on Tuesday. It didn’t come from standard venture capital, though. It came from General Catalyst. Specifically, from a fund called Customer Value Fund or CVF for short.
It’s essentially a loan with non-traditional repayment terms that caps what investors can take back.
Here is how it works. CVF hands over the cash. Then the startup pays it back. They don’t just send interest checks. They hand over a fixed, capped percentage of their revenue. General Catalyst does not get stock. They aren’t buying ownership stakes.
IM8 keeps its shares. Founders don’t dilute. No board members from GC will be voting on strategy. This isn’t for every startup. You need predictable income. You need a plan for growth that money can actually fuel. As General Catalyst told TechCrunch before, this model suits businesses with clear paths to revenue. It is an option, not the rule.
Danny Yeung leads the charge at IM8. He dropped out of high school. Then he built Prenetics into a publicly traded health company in 2022*. That kind of success puts you at specific dinner tables.
Yeung had dinner with David Beckham.
From that meal, IM8 was born. It operates under the Prenetics umbrella. The product? A vitamin drink packed with longevity compounds. We are talking about things like Coenzyme Q10 and açai fruit extract. Customers subscribe. They pay monthly. The model relies on habit, not one-off purchases.
The money has a specific purpose.
The loan covers up to 70% customer acquisition costs. In exchange General Catalyst takes a slice of “reference income.” That sounds like corporate jargon until you read the fine print.
It means revenue from those new customers times a fixed gross-margin number. It gets complicated quickly. But the key detail remains the same.
There is a cap.
General Catalyst gets their investment back plus that limited share of revenue. Once they hit the ceiling they step back. The money flowing in after that goes straight to Prenetics. The team.
Why do it this way? Maybe you value control over cheap cash. Maybe you don’t want a stranger on your cap table.
What do you think happens when the cap lifts? Does the pressure stay?
