The Idea
At the tail end of 2023, Danny Yeung sat down for dinner in Hong Kong with a guest a mutual friend had brought along: David Beckham. Yeung had built and sold a daily deals startup to Groupon within six months of launching it, then founded Prenetics, a genomics company that became a COVID testing giant, processing over 28 million tests and listing on Nasdaq as Hong Kong's first unicorn to go public anywhere. But by that dinner, the pandemic cash machine was dead and Prenetics was a public company doing $21.7 million a year, searching for a second act.
Beckham, meanwhile, had spent 20 years with access to the world's best doctors, nutritionists and fitness coaches, and knew most people would never get anything close. Over that one meal, they landed on the same idea: strip the supplement aisle down to a single, clinically dosed daily scoop, built by actual scientists, that ordinary people could trust. This was the beginning of IM8.
The Execution
- 2021: Prenetics rides the COVID testing boom to $275.9 million in FY2021 revenue, up 323% year on year, running labs at airports in Hong Kong and the UK.
- May 2022: The company lists on Nasdaq via Adrian Cheng's Artisan SPAC at a $1.7 billion equity value, the first Hong Kong unicorn to go public in any market. The stock falls over 26% around its debut.
- 2023: COVID revenue evaporates. Prenetics shrinks to $21.7 million in annual revenue with a $28.4 million adjusted net loss, a near-death year for a company that had done 12x that two years earlier.
- July 2024: Beckham becomes a strategic investor in Prenetics and co-founding partner of IM8, roughly seven months after that first dinner.
- November 2024: IM8 launches with two products, Daily Ultimate Essentials and Daily Ultimate Longevity, shipping to 31 countries from day one, backed by a scientific advisory board spanning Mayo Clinic, Yale and NASA alumni.
- January 2025: IM8 unveils in the US with a New York launch event and a Beckham appearance on the TODAY Show that sends customer interest surging, on the heels of NSF Certified for Sport status.
- October 2025: Monthly revenue scales from roughly $600,000 at launch to $6.6 million by September 2025, as IM8 launches a longevity formula targeting all 12 hallmarks of ageing.
- November 2025: IM8 hits $108 million in ARR just 11 months after launch, with 13 million servings delivered to 420,000+ customers and 80% of new orders coming in as subscriptions. Giannis Antetokounmpo and world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka sign on as athlete partners.
- July 2026: Prenetics closes $1 billion in non-dilutive growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund to bankroll up to 70% of IM8's marketing spend, with every $1 of customer acquisition returning $1.44 in gross profit. IM8 now delivers 200,000 servings a day across 43 markets, takes an order every 27 seconds, and is guiding to $210-220 million in 2026 revenue and $400 million or more in 2027.
The lesson?
Danny Yeung's COVID testing business didn't fail, its market simply vanished, taking 90% of his revenue with it. Most public company CEOs would have managed the decline. Yeung treated the wreckage as a distribution platform: a Nasdaq listing, a balance sheet, and a science team waiting for a product worth selling. One dinner with Beckham gave him the product, and the celebrity was the ingredient he refused to lead with, betting on clinical dosing and NSF certification instead. Nineteen months later he'd raised a billion dollars without giving up a single share. Your company isn't the product you sell. It's the machine that lets you sell the next one.