David Beckham

For roughly thirty years David Beckham turned down every supplement company that came to him, on a logic his eventual partner Danny Yeung states plainly: "If he puts his name on a product, no one's going to go after Danny. Everyone's going to go after David."¹ He said yes in 2023, to a company whose market capitalization had just fallen to roughly 50 million dollars.

Beckham is a former England footballer who became a co-founding equity partner in IM8, a wellness and supplements company he built with Yeung starting in 2023. Rather than a paid endorsement, the arrangement was structured as a genuine partnership: Beckham holds equity in both IM8 and its NASDAQ-listed parent company, Prenetics, from day one, his team joins weekly calls with the operating team, and he has final say on the taste profile of new products.²

Before IM8, Beckham had turned down supplement partnerships for roughly thirty years, wary that a product carrying his name would draw scrutiny at him personally rather than at a partner brand. He met Yeung at a London dinner in the summer of 2023 and agreed to the deal only after Yeung, a consumer and life-sciences operator running a publicly listed, audited company, insisted that the brand had to outlive Beckham himself. He committed at a moment when Prenetics's market capitalization had fallen to roughly 50 million dollars from a prior peak above 1 billion dollars, a signal Yeung reads as evidence of Beckham's risk appetite and long time horizon.¹ The product idea traced back to Beckham's own life: he and Victoria Beckham had been taking twelve to fifteen supplements a day and struggled to keep up the routine while traveling, so IM8 built a single drink meant to replace sixteen supplements, with Beckham's one non-negotiable being that however good the formulation, it had to taste good.

The partnership fits a pattern that shows up elsewhere in his career: waiting, then committing fully once the right structure appears. Years earlier, his Los Angeles Galaxy contract had included an option on a Major League Soccer expansion franchise for 25 million dollars, a stake that became Inter Miami and that Yeung estimates is now worth roughly 1.5 to 2 billion dollars, citing it as the model for the seven-to-ten-year view he expects Beckham to bring to IM8.¹ IM8's highest-value product line, a 500-dollar-per-quarter prepaid tier, carries his name as the Beckham Stack.