No alcohol? No problem

The recently crowned king of nonalcoholic beers just added a little more gold to the hoard – and didn’t even have to slay a dragon to get it.

Athletic Brewing, a nonalcoholic beer company, announced yesterday that it has raised $50 million in a fundraising round led by General Atlantic.

The deal values Athletic – whose name was chosen both to reflect the lifestyle of its customers and because it’s easy to shout in a noisy bar (seriously) – at $800 million, double its valuation from two years ago. And for good reason.

The nonalcoholic brewer, which generated $90 million in revenue in 2023, has been growing faster than an always-hungry teenager:

• Athletic (founded 2017) currently holds ~19% market share within nonalcoholic beer, according to NielsenIQ data.
• In 2023, the company sold more than 258,000 barrels of beer – a performance that, despite not selling any alcohol-containing products, was good enough to make it a top-20 US brewery. It also recently passed Heineken and Budweiser to become the #1 seller of nonalcoholic beer in US grocery stores.

Moving forward, Athletic plans to use the fresh capital to continue expanding both its sales and production capacity to meet rising consumer demand.

📈 Nonalcoholic beer is currently the fastest-growing segment of the beer market. And its growth is being largely driven by young people. More than 40% of Americans say they’re actively trying to drink less alcohol in 2024; that percentage jumps to 49% for millennials and 61% for Gen Z.