Silicon Valley’s Favorite Alternative Energy Drinks
Cupboards in tech land are increasingly cluttered with brands promising to deliver Red Bull–style jolts through ingredients like ketones, paraxanthine and L-theanine.
In Silicon Valley, cutting back on booze has been in vogue for a while. Now the tech elite is going cold turkey on something else: traditional energy drinks like Red Bull and 5-Hour Energy.
That’s led to a fresh wave of beverage startups selling elixirs that purport to give an animating jolt to the system but with starkly different ingredients than the drinks that have long crowded grocery store coolers. “It’s very clear to me—to a lot of people in the industry—that caffeine plus sucralose in a can is done,” said Michael Brandt, co-founder and CEO of Ketone-IQ, referring to common artificial sweetener. His Ketone-IQ has attracted investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Zynga billionaire Mark Pincus for its ketones-based drink. “The market isn’t asking for more of that.”
If Brandt’s company and the others on our list below can get everyone guzzling their products, they’ll almost certainly line themselves up as attractive acquisitions for bigger drink companies. Those larger rivals have been thirsty lately: Late last year, Keurig Dr Pepper said it would pay $990 million for a majority stake in energy drink and supplement brand Ghost, and in February energy drink maker Celsius bought rival Alani Nu for $1.7 billion.