The Idea

In 2014, Michael Brandt was a Google product manager who spent his mornings running marathon-pace intervals and his evenings buried in metabolic research. He kept circling the same frustration. Ketones, the clean-burning backup fuel your body makes from fat, only show up when you deprive yourself: a multi-day fast, a brutally long ride, a strict keto diet. The payoff was real. The entry fee was suffering.

Brandt's thought was simple. What if you could skip the starving and just drink the stuff?

He took it to Geoffrey Woo, a fellow Stanford computer science grad who had recently sold his first startup, Glassmap, to Groupon. Neither had a background in nutrition, manufacturing or beverages. There was no ketone supply chain to plug into, no shelf to sit on, and virtually no consumer who could define the word. One investor put their odds of success at under 1%. This was the beginning of Ketone-IQ.

The Execution

• 2014: The pair launched as Nootrobox, a subscription service for nootropics, selling supplement stacks named Sprint, Rise and Yawn alongside Go Cubes, chewable coffee. Ketones were still a side obsession.
• December 2015: Marissa Mayer and Mark Pincus put in $500,000 as angels, then Andreessen Horowitz led a $2M seed round with Chris Dixon, a Soylent backer, running the deal.
• December 2016: They went on Shark Tank asking $2M for 5%, a $40M valuation and the biggest ask in the show's history to that point. All six sharks passed, with Kevin O'Leary telling them they were flying close to the sun. Woo later claimed orders ran six times higher the weekend the episode aired.
• 2017: The company rebranded to H.V.M.N. and launched the first commercially available drinkable ketone ester. It sold for $99 for three bottles, about $33 a serving, tasted foul, and BuzzFeed News ran a piece questioning whether the science held up. Go Cubes were killed off in 2019.
• September 2018: Vittoria Bussi broke the UCI Hour record on HVMN ketones. By the 2019 Tour de France, teams including Jumbo-Visma and Lotto-Soudal had confirmed using ketone esters. The customer base was microscopic and deadly serious: Navy SEALs and pro cyclists, people for whom a horrible taste was close to a badge of honour.
• January 2022: The pivot that mattered. On the back of a $6M research contract from US Special Operations Command, HVMN launched Ketone-IQ, a next-generation drinkable ketone it manufactured itself. Cheaper to make, easier to swallow, and no longer priced like a lab reagent.
• April 2023: Ketone-IQ launched nationwide in Sprouts, its first serious move off the internet and onto grocery shelves.
• 2024: In January it signed a three-year deal with UCI WorldTour team Visma-Lease a Bike. In May it retired the HVMN name entirely and became Ketone-IQ, buying ketone.com and naming the company after its one product.
• 2025: UFC champion Jon Jones joined as co-owner and Chief Performance Officer, Steven Bartlett came on as an investor, the shot went nationwide in Target, and the company took a seven-figure investment to fund the retail push.
• Today: Revenue is in nine figures, roughly a $100M business built on a $5 shot sold through Target, Sprouts, Vitamin Shoppe and Amazon. Brandt reckons Ketone-IQ now accounts for 80% of the ketone market. The site counts 700,000+ customers and 17M+ shots served, with a16z, Chris Hemsworth and Jake Paul on the cap table and Joe Rogan, who was drinking it before any deal existed, doing the heavy lifting on distribution.

The lesson?

For four years they sold the world's first drinkable ketone at $33 a bottle and almost nobody outside SEAL teams and the Tour de France cared. The molecule was never the problem. The $100M business arrived when Brandt got the cost down to a $5 shot, put it in green apple and raspberry lemonade, and stopped lecturing people about metabolism. He sells what he calls a feeling in a bottle. Nobody buys a $33 bottle of chemistry. Everybody buys a $5 shot of focus.