From a Manly kitchen to category contender: inside Hyro's Side Stage-backed US launch

With Side Stage Ventures leading its growth round, the Australian electrolyte challenger is taking its subscription playbook to the multi-billion-dollar US hydration market.

Most consumer brands die in the gap between a great product and a repeatable growth engine. Hyro, the Australian hydration company, spent 25 months proving it had both before raising a dollar of institutional capital.

Now, with a growth round led by Australian early-stage fund Side Stage Ventures, the company is pointing that engine at the United States — a market where electrolyte powders have become one of the fastest-growing corners of functional beverage.

Founders Steve and Taylor Chapman have built Hyro into a subscription-first business with more than 11,600 active subscribers and a take rate north of 80 per cent. The pitch to investors leaned heavily on retention: a 6.1× LTV:CAC ratio and a payback period of roughly three months, numbers that look more like software than CPG.

"AI can't replicate a physical product people reach for three to five times a day. That's the bet — a brand in everyone's water bottle."

Why Side Stage leaned in

Side Stage, an early backer of Leonardo.Ai and Airtasker, is sector-agnostic but built around backing "outlier founders in big markets." Partners describe Hyro as a textbook fit — a repeat consumer founder (Steve previously scaled Shine to $60M across 7,000 stores) attacking a category measured in the tens of billions globally.

The US go-to-market mirrors the Australian one: celebrity and athlete ambassadors at the top of funnel, TikTok and UGC creators in the middle, and Meta and Google performance at the bottom — increasingly orchestrated by an in-house stack of AI agents the company says lets five people run like fifteen.

The Chapmans are relocating to Southern California to run the launch personally. If the Australian curve repeats, Side Stage's first cheque could prove one of its best.