How an Aussie husband-and-wife team built a US$1.2B hydration brand in four years

Steve and Taylor Chapman turned a kitchen-bench idea into one of the decade's standout consumer exits — with Side Stage Ventures betting first.

In 2024, Steve and Taylor Chapman were mixing electrolyte powder on a kitchen bench in Manly, Australia. Four years later, they sold the company they built around it — Hyro — to a global drinks strategic for roughly US$1.2 billion.

The throughline, the Chapmans say, was discipline: a subscription-first model, ruthless retention, and a refusal to chase retail shelves before the brand had earned the pull. By the time Hyro raised institutional capital, it had already compounded revenue every month since launch and crossed 11,600 subscribers.

"We didn't want to be a brand for athletes or sick people. We wanted to be the daily ritual for everyone else."

The investor who moved first

Australian fund Side Stage Ventures, co-founded by Markus Kahlbetzer and Ben Grabiner, led Hyro's growth round at a A$30 million valuation, taking the first institutional cheque. It proved a defining decision: the fund's stake is understood to have returned multiples of its entire fund at exit.

Steve Chapman was not a first-timer — he had previously scaled energy-drink brand Shine to $60 million across 7,000 retail stores. But Hyro, he says, was the one built for scale from day one: an AI-run growth engine, owned supply chain, and a brand consumers chose to wear as identity.

For the Chapmans, who relocated their young family to California to run the US launch, the exit marks the end of a four-year sprint — and, they hint, the start of the next one.