The Idea:
In 2019, Rashad Hossain was three years into a brand management job at Kraft Heinz, working on Maxwell House. He was the son of Bangladeshi immigrants who had raised him in a one-bed flat in Boston, where money was tight and food was scarce. That childhood left him obsessed with what people eat and drink.
He was also drinking 10 to 20 cups of coffee a day. So was his close friend Andrée Werner, an applied maths graduate from his 2016 Harvard class who had gone on to study cello at Juilliard.
Hossain was frustrated. Big Coffee wasn’t innovating, and the “healthy” alternatives on shelves weren’t good enough. Hunting for natural sources of energy, the pair stumbled onto adaptogenic mushrooms. They quit their paths, put in $15,000 each from their savings, and raised another $70,000 from Werner’s family and friends.
The product: instant coffee blended with six organic mushrooms, sold as coffee without the jitters or the crash.
This was the beginning of RYZE.
The Execution:
- June 2020: RYZE launched online in the middle of lockdown and made just $120,000 in its first year. With no marketing budget, the founders sold by hand, texting, calling and DMing customers from around 20 phones each.
- 2021: A $1M pre-seed from PS27 Ventures and Reign Ventures went almost straight into Facebook and Instagram ads. Revenue hit $2.9M by year end, and the business turned profitable.
- 2022: RYZE closed the year on nearly $18M in revenue with 30,000+ customers, landing Hossain on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
- January 2023: Another $2.15M from Valency Capital, and sales grew tenfold to an estimated $100M+ that year.
- The ad machine: RYZE treated Meta as a lab, running 1,000+ creatives at any one time, mostly real customers making coffee in real kitchens. Today it has 15,000 active Meta ads and ships roughly 634 new creatives a week.
- 2024: RYZE launched on Amazon, quickly became the site’s best-selling coffee alternative, and finished the year above $200M in revenue.
- 2025: Revenue rose 50% to an estimated $300M+, all online, on just $4.15M of disclosed funding. Then came the setback. Insiders said the company was up for sale and found no credible buyer. Forbes put its EBITDA margin at around 3%, and industry investors pointed to heavy acquisition spend and high subscriber churn.
- January 2026: RYZE hit shelves for the first time, launching in 1,900+ Target stores with three exclusive latte flavours.
- Today: RYZE is America’s best-selling mushroom coffee, with a private Facebook group of around 500,000 members. Forbes estimates the founders own about 60% of a business that could be worth $600M in a sale.
The lesson?
RYZE turned a $100,000 kitty into $300M+ a year by testing creative at a volume most brands would call insane, with thousands of ads live and hundreds of new ones every week. But a 3% margin and a sale with no takers are the other half of the story. Paid social can fill the top of the funnel almost without limit. It can’t make customers stay. Ads can buy you a customer. Only the product can keep one.