Neutonic Raises £2.7M to Scale Its Nootropic Productivity Drink Globally at a $20M Valuation

July 1, 2025

Neutonic, the London-based nootropic productivity drinks brand, raised £2.7 million ($3.7 million) in its first funding round in July 2025, valuing the company at $20 million. The angel round was backed by a high-profile group of investors including Grenade founder Alan Barratt, fitness influencer Kayla Itsines, entrepreneur Codie Sanchez, podcaster Dan Martell, and fitness personality Mike Thurston. The funding will be used to scale Neutonic’s workforce, deepen UK and US retail distribution, appoint regional leads for international expansion, and bring new product variants to market. Neutonic was founded in November 2023 by James Smith, Chris Williamson, Luke Betts, and Shan Hanif.

The energy drink market is large, well-established, and increasingly at odds with where consumer preferences are heading. The category’s dominant brands — Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar — are built on high sugar, artificial flavours, and doses of caffeine designed for a rapid energy spike followed by an equally rapid crash. As the consumer shift toward health-conscious, performance-oriented products has accelerated, a category gap has opened for beverages that deliver cognitive function benefits — improved focus, sustained mental energy, clarity — without the sugar, synthetic ingredients, and post-consumption crash that conventional energy drinks produce. This is the nootropic drinks opportunity that Neutonic was built to capture.

Neutonic’s Productivity Drink is formulated around a set of clinically researched cognitive performance ingredients: Cognizin (citicoline), Rhodiola rosea, Panax ginseng, L-theanine, and B vitamins, each at doses matched to the clinical evidence for cognitive effect. The formula is sugar-free and avoids the synthetic additives that the brand’s founders identified as the primary gap in the market. The brand was conceived by Shan Hanif, CEO of Genflow — a creator economy management and commerce business — who pitched the idea of a productivity drink to his co-founders as ‘productivity being the next fitness.’ James Smith, whose evidence-based, no-nonsense fitness content has built a following of 3.4 million across social media, brought both distribution reach and brand credibility to the launch. Chris Williamson, whose Modern Wisdom podcast has accumulated over 1 billion downloads and regularly features conversations about productivity, cognition, and performance, brought a natural audience of exactly the demographic that Neutonic is targeting.

The commercial results in the first 18 months of trading were exceptional. Neutonic sold over 3 million cans, generated $10 million in revenue, and achieved the top position on Amazon in both the energy drink and grocery categories — a combination that demonstrates both mass-market appeal and genuine consumer pull rather than speculative distribution. The $20 million valuation at first raise reflects the company’s having already demonstrated the kind of commercial traction that most beverage brands take several years and multiple funding rounds to reach.

The funding round’s composition — led by industry operators rather than institutional VCs — is itself a statement of brand credibility. Alan Barratt of Grenade spent three decades building the UK’s most successful performance nutrition brand before its acquisition, and his investment reflects a practitioner’s assessment that Neutonic has the product, founder quality, and distribution flywheel to become a dominant brand in its category. Kayla Itsines brings a fitness audience with strong overlap with Neutonic’s target consumer, and Codie Sanchez and Dan Martell bring the business-building and entrepreneurship networks relevant to a founder-led direct-to-consumer brand scaling toward retail dominance.

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