Comedian Merrick Watts is opening Posca Hydrate, his sugar free hydration soda, to public investors for the first time.

The brand is already showing momentum with 800,000 cans sold totalling $2.5 million in revenue to date, and is now eyeing expansion into the US and beyond.

This is a different proposition to a typical celebrity endorsement, with Watts building Posca himself, from the first kitchen bench experiment to the business it is today.

Co-founder Ed Stening said: “People are naturally dubious when someone asks them to invest in their business. But Merrick spent more than 20 years on radio earning that trust every single morning. Australians don’t see him as a celebrity, they see him as a mate they can trust. We also weren’t going to ask his audience to back us until we had runs on the board, real numbers and an expansion plan worth getting excited about, not just a familiar name.”

It was while researching ancient wine history for his wine comedy show An Idiot’s Guide to Wine that Watts found references to Posca, the vinegar, salt and water drink that powered Roman soldiers during battle more than 2000 years ago and started recreating it on his kitchen bench.

Watts works most days on Posca, from before 6am to late at night, by his own account clocking in from “6:15 yesterday morning until 9:15 last night”.

“All I do is work. That’s genuinely all I do,” he said. “This isn’t a project I want to put my name on and walk away from. This is a thing I want to see explode.”

He traces the shift to his time on SAS Australia in 2020, noting “I walked out of SAS Australia a different person, and I went to go and crush the world.”

There is nothing else like Posca anywhere in the world. Watts and Stening call it a genuine first mover opportunity, a 2000 year old drink brought back from the dead with no direct global competitor, and it’s that opportunity, not just the founder’s name, that has drawn advisors and backers with deep beverage industry experience to the business.

That confidence is backed by the brand’s serious distribution – 3000+ stores nationally, through major supermarket and convenience channels such as IGA, Foodland, and Foodworks. The company holds 27 trademarks globally, is in distribution talks in Singapore, Hong Kong and the UAE, and is laying groundwork for a US launch.

It’s that trajectory Posca is now opening to the public, through an equity crowdfunding raise on OnMarket.

“We’ve built the distribution, the team, and a product with clinical work behind it, not just a story,” said Stening. “This raise is about funding the next phase properly: expanding our footprint here, building out our US entry, and bringing more people into a business Merrick and I have been building every single day for years.”

Learn more here.