Human Powered Health, a human performance company with labs that offer athletic performance and health assessments, has partnered with wellness and nutrition company Momentous.

Human Powered Health Cycling, U.S.-based Women’s WorldTour professional cycling team, is one organization that will benefit from the initiative, where its athletes will have access to Momentous’ NSF Certified for Sport products, comprehensive physiological assessments from the Human Powered Health Performance Lab and a hyper-personalized training and recovery program.

“Our team strives to push the limits of human performance,” Human Powered Health Cycling’s team trainer Callum McQueen said. “This partnership provides us with the resources and expertise to do just that. Supplementation is key for many sports, but especially in cycling due to its high demands on the body. Momentous’ line of products is ideal because we will use them to aid recovery and promote additional key nutrients that athletes can’t get from food alone.”

Human Powered Health clients and email subscribers will also be able to purchase Momentous products at a 15% discount within the performance labs and online. Human Powered Health has labs in Boston and Wellesley, Minneapolis and Scottsdale. 

“At Momentous, we are committed to providing athletes with the highest quality, most effective nutrition solutions,” Momentous founder and CEO Jeff Byers said. “Partnering with Human Powered Health allows us to directly empower elite cyclists on their journey to peak performance by integrating our products into their approach to training and racing. We are excited to support Human Powered Health in all facets of this partnership.”

Last year, consumer-focused investment firm Humble Growth acquired a significant minority stake in the Utah-based Momentous. 

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Momentous, a fast-growing human performance and nutrition company, announced its latest innovation: Elite Recovery, a post-workout drink developed in partnership with an unnamed NFL team.

The culmination of extensive research and development, Elite Recovery is designed to bring professional-grade recovery nutrition to everyday athletes. Momentous touts that the drink can facilitate recovery from activities including a 90-minute bike ride, high school football training camps and long skiing days. 

According to the nutrition brand, the product comes after NFL nutritionists experimented with hundreds of different smoothies and juices daily to maintain their athletes’ peak performance. After producing 10,000 bottles, Elite Recovery is now on the market. 

“The launch of Elite Recovery is a reflection of the relationships we have built across the professional and collegiate sports landscape,” said Momentous co-founder and CEO Jeff Byers.

“We currently sell our products into over 200 locker rooms across the country, and in 2022, we had the opportunity to begin working directly with an NFL franchise’s staff to develop a product and formulation to best meet the needs of their athletes and operations,” Byers added. “The feedback from that project was overwhelmingly positive, and today, we’re thrilled to be able to bring that same product to a wider audience who are pushing their personal boundaries in their training.”

Elite Recovery boasts a comprehensive blend of ingredients including protein, complex carbohydrates and collagen. It also includes creatine, to promote lean body mass, tart cherry, to help manage inflammation, and ashwagandha, which lowers cortisol levels. 

Momentous was launched in 2018 to offer science-backed supplements (at least seven of which have earned the Informed-Sport certification). Earlier this year, Humble Growth, a wellness-focused venture capital firm, acquired a significant minority stake in Momentous in a deal worth $32 million.

Byers, a retired NFL offensive lineman, is well-versed on the importance of proper supplementation. He says Momentous is committed to effecting change within the supplement industry by offering scientifically validated products.

“The supplement industry was like the wild west of high performance when I retired,” Byers said. “Our goal at Momentous is to provide athletes with the knowledge and products they need to excel.”

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Venture incubator Squared Circles has closed a $40 million Series A funding round to launch and scale at least five health and wellness brands over the next three years.

The funding news follows a McKinsey market report finding that 82% of U.S. consumers now deem wellness a top priority, with Gen Z and Millennial consumers purchasing more wellness-centered products and services than prior generations.

Private equity firm L Catterton led the recent funding, following a previous investment in Squared Circle’s seed round.

Founded by Alexander Gilkes, Osman Khan and Lukas Derksen, Squared Circles has invested and exited in hair wellness company Nutrafol and has a vast portfolio that includes Magic Molecule, a line of skin-healing solutions, Algae Cooking Club, a healthy cooking oil brand and Freaks of Nature, a high-tech outdoor skincare brand co-founded by pro surfer Kelly Slater. 

Khan, Squared Circles’ co-founder and CEO, noted that the incubator wants to work with scientists to shape a future where products benefit both consumers and the planet. 

“We are excited to collaborate with leading consumer-focused investors such as L Catterton, who not only share our long-term vision for creating transformational brands and our dedication to ingenuity and sustainability but also bring the extensive consumer expertise and deep operational knowledge that will help support our future endeavors,” Khan said.

In its incubation (stealth) category, Squared Circles lists six projects, including nutritious food products for GLP-1 users, tasty functional medicine for children, a sustained energy and cognitive function initiative and one centered on sperm and whole-body health for men, aptly titled “Project Swimmers.” The venture studio says it uses an “AI-enabled playbook” to commercialize product launches in 12-18 months and licenses bioscience IP.

Investors Eye Wellness

What’s behind the continued wellness wave? According to McKinsey’s hypothesis, consumer interest in health and wellness was already gaining momentum before COVID-19, but the onset of the pandemic opened the floodgates. 

“There was this massive shock to many people’s lives and in such a way that it really made people much more conscious of their health and what they could do to be proactive about taking their health into their own hands and living a long and healthy life,” said Mckinsey partner Anna Pione on a recent episode of The McKinsey Podcast.

Even saddled with student loan debt and navigating housing affordability challenges, Gen Z and Millennials are willing to cut back on extras in favor of health-supporting purchases such as functional foods. 

The global wellness market was valued at $1.8 trillion, and investors (retailers, too) are clearly paying attention. Among other funding moves, Lance Armstrong’s VC fund Next Ventures is targeting $100 million — its first fund in nearly five years — to invest in whole-person health, preventive care and diagnostics.

Last fall, RxBar and Orgain founders raised $312 million for Humble Growth, an N.Y.-based growth equity investment firm focusing on visionary consumer wellness brands. The firm acquired a significant minority stake in human performance brand Momentous earlier this year in a deal worth $32 million. 

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Erica Good, the co-founder and chief operating officer of fast-growing supplement and sports nutrition brand Momentous, is looking to change the narrative about women and human performance.

When co-founding Amp Human, a human performance company that acquired Momentous in 2021 and took on the latter’s name, Good realized how understudied and underrepresented women are in the athletic performance space. 

“The vast majority of high-performance studies are on cis male subjects and even then, in the very narrow age range of 18-25,” Good tells Athletech News. “Researchers face the challenge of teasing out small effects in fairly small subject populations and have held the position that women’s menstrual cycles add another variable that makes finding these effects more difficult.”

Good also noted that the financial disparities between men’s and women’s professional sports exacerbate the problem.

“The net effect is that published literature is far better at helping strength coaches, dieticians, and athletic trainers who care for and make decisions for a male body versus a female,” she says. 

Advocating for Change

Good has been focused on advocacy work in the human performance space, including going to Capitol Hill with a group of female researchers, athletes, military service members, and experts to advocate for more gender diversity in clinical research on high performance.

“We also advocated for required training for practitioners within the military to learn about how female high-performance physiology differs from males,” Good recalls.

Good adds that she’s “excited to see more studies on broader subject pools emerge in high performance.”

“Take age as a parallel example: Most high-performance studies are on participants ages 18-25 and most of our understanding of how the body ages comes from studies on aging participants in average to below-average health,” she notes. “Now, more people in their 40s and 50s have consciously kept high-performance lifestyles for decades and I would love to see how their outcomes differ in their 70s and 80s from the outcomes that existing studies predict.”  

Good also noted that hormone management is gaining more much-needed attention.

“Companies and researchers are paying attention and it’s helping shift solutions upstream, for example from direct hormone replacement therapy to supplements that naturally boost hormone levels over time,” Good says. “This shift is important as direct replacement solutions are thought to suppress natural production over time.”

What’s Next for Momentous? 

Momentous, which Good runs alongside CEO Jeff Byers, has had a big year. The company recently raised $32 million in an investment from Humble Growth and opened a new West Coast office in Santa Monica primarily for its marketing, partnerships, and content teams. Park City, Utah, will remain the company’s headquarters, with operations, product development, research and innovation.

Momentous is also preparing some exciting upcoming product launches.

“We will introduce new products to our portfolio later this year that we’re excited about that will offer more solutions within our core pillars (sleep, cognitive health, athletic performance, hormone support, and foundational health),” Good shares. “One of our new athletic performance products has been years in the making and we believe it will be a true disruptor within its category.” 

Know Your ‘Why’

Good also offered some advice for women looking to succeed in the fitness and wellness industry.

“First, identify your purpose for being in the industry and embrace your mission—the difference you’re striving to make in the world,” she says. “Within our team at Momentous, we like for everyone to know their individual ‘why”’ because with an infinite range of things one could get up in the morning to do, knowing why Momentous helps our team bring their best energy and self to their roles.”

“As a founder, I recognize that diverse perspectives and experiences lead to interesting new ideas and trends in the world,” Good adds. “Embrace the diversity of perspectives that life experiences bring, as they can provide unique angles and insights.” 

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The $1.8 trillion global wellness market, coupled with advancements in biometric tracking and health technology, has investors banking on the future of wellness.

Renowned cyclist and endurance athlete Lance Armstrong’s Next Ventures is the latest VC fund to get in on the wellness craze, targeting $100 million — its first fund in almost five years — to invest in whole-person health, preventive care and diagnostics.

Next Ventures managing partner Julian Eison, was forthright:

“We said, hey, this whole consumerization of health is omnipresent,” Eison told PitchBook, which reported on Next Ventures’ plans to write pre-seed, seed and Series A checks with an average check size of $2 million. 

It’s a viewpoint shared by other leading investors and experts.

As Jon Canarick of North Castle Partners, Mark Grabowski of Snapdragon Capital Partners and Lance Dietz of KB Partners shared during Athletech News’ DISRUPT 2023 video series, there is an overall sense of optimism surrounding the health, fitness and wellness markets. 

“I think almost universally there’s growth in consumer expenditure in health and wellness across multiple categories,” Grabowski said, noting that the industry as a whole is on an “upward trajectory.” 

Wearables Track More Than Just Fitness

He also indicated that health and fitness trackers have even more runway, especially with consumers embracing preventive wellness practices. Advancing technology also means that wearables no longer cater to elite athletes or weekend warriors. Instead, consumers of all ages and in any health condition can track their health metrics, widening the available consumer market.

“When you think of everything from blood testing to stool samples, there you’re actually addressing some different issues,” Grabowski pointed out. “It’s not about, ‘Am I optimizing my workout performance?’ It’s about allergies, chronic issues, immune responses and other things that people are dealing with.” 

Investors are taking note, with Ultrahuman’s multi-device ecosystem the latest funding recipient. The company just secured $35 million in a Series B to advance its health monitoring endeavors, which include a smart ring, a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), a ‘Blood Vision’ system and an upcoming home health device that assesses environmental impacts on well-being. 

Next Ventures’ portfolio touts some notable health and wellness names, including smart ring brand Oura, AI wearable company Humane and Genopets, a move-to-earn game. The VC fund also invested in Utah-based Amp Human in 2019, maker of PR Lotion, which merged with Momentous, a ‘human performance” supplement brand.

As for Oura, the smart ring maker is expected to enter a “health-focused” chapter, having recently welcomed an executive from the Apple Health team and signing a deal to make its wearable device FSA/HSA eligible. 

Wellness CPGs Gain Steam, Too

Tech may always be a hot area for its jaw-dropping capabilities that seem to advance each week, but good old consumer packaged goods have been receiving the attention of investors, too — especially those in the wellness categories. 

Even major retailers like Target are banking on the wellness wave, introducing over 1,000 health-supporting products across all verticals. For good reason, too: consumers have not only become more health-conscious, but GLP-1 users have redirected their spending away from unhealthy items and toward wellness purchases.

Bloom Nutrition, a supplement brand in the greens and superfoods category recently scored a major investment from C4 maker Nutrabolt. 

Health and wellness guru/A-lister Gwyneth Paltrow, no stranger to all things green juice and longevity-supporting, is also eyeing the power of products with wide appeal. The goop founder has turned feeling good into a profitable brand, catering to the masses with a new line of budget-friendly wellness and beauty products, a departure from goop’s higher-priced items. 

Paltrow’s Los Angeles-based VC firm, Kinship Ventures, has reportedly sought to raise $75 million for its debut fund, eyeing early-stage consumer goods and tech companies.

Over on the East Coast, Humble Growth, a N.Y.-based growth equity firm launched by an all-star team that includes RxBar founder Peter Rahal, secured over $312 million for its debut. Earlier this year, Humble Growth acquired a significant minority stake in Momentous in a deal worth $32 million.

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Humble Growth, a consumer-focused investment firm concentrating on disruptive wellness brands in the food, beverage, health, beauty, vitamins, supplements and apparel space, has acquired a significant minority stake in Momentous, a fast-growing human performance and nutrition company. The deal is worth $32 million, Athletech News has learned.

The strategic partnership sees Momentous co-founders Jeff Byers and Erica Good continuing to lead the company together as CEO and president, respectively. Last year, the Park City, Utah-based brand tripled its revenue from 2022 and projects to double its revenue again this year. 

Next up, Momentous plans to open a new Los Angeles-based headquarters, grow its staff and advance the customer experience of its DTC model.

The human performance brand recently released an updated version of its website, allowing consumers to explore products based on their desired “pillar of performance” — such as cognitive function, sleep, athletic performance, foundational health and hormone support.

The timing is ideal, as Americans are eagerly spending hard-earned dollars on vitamins and supplements, especially those in the performance, recovery and mood genres.

NY-based Humble Growth, led by RxBar co-founder Peter Rahal, debuted a $312 million fund last fall, with a who’s who list of investors including Nestlé Health Science, Verlinvest, BodyArmor co-founder Mike Repole, Stonyfield Farm founder and CEO Gary Hirshberg, IT Cosmetics co-founder Paulo Lima and Ainsworth Pet Nutrition founder Sean Lang.

Not Your Traditional Supplement Brand

Aligned with Humble Growth’s mission to partner with entrepreneurs and brands promoting health and wellness, Momentous was launched in 2018 to offer high-quality, science-backed products (seven of which tout the Informed-Sport certification) to meet the needs of elite performers.

Human performance is an area that Byers knows well as a former NFL offensive lineman. After retiring from the NFL, the Momentous CEO became aware of a major gap in the supplement space. He first launched Amp Human, creating the brand’s popular PR Lotion product before acquiring the Momentous brand in 2021 and merging it into the company.

Instead of marketing gimmicks, Byers’ approach to supplements is to rewrite the current industry script with an expert approach, tapping the talent of Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Andy Galpin and other health and wellness practitioners. 

“Supplements to me have a weird connotation, so our goal is to build the ‘anti-supplement supplement company,'” he told ATN in an exclusive interview last year. “We want to be your trusted partner in life optimization.”

As part of being a trusted partner, Momentous is listening — and delivering. With its finger on the pulse of consumer desires, the company will launch a pre-workout later this year that has been in development for years and includes Department of Defense research funding.

“Our goal was to develop a pre-workout formula that delivers cognitive and physical performance benefits but without synthetic sources of caffeine or stimulants, and we’re excited to bring this product to our customers who have been asking for it,” Byers said.

The brand also plans to introduce additional products that are geared toward the needs of women.

From the NFL to Consumers

Passionate about targeting “mindset” consumers who seek quality products to optimize their health and performance, Byers’ position has led Momentous to secure nearly 200 pro and college sports teams partnerships, including a deal to create a custom recovery product for an NFL team, along with millions worth of innovation contracts with the Department of Defense.

The brand has also attracted pro athlete shareholders such as NFL Pro Bowlers Luke Kuechly, Kyle Rudolph, and Ndamukong Suh, former professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, Ironman Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay and more. 

Byers remarked that joining with Humble Growth on the heels of exponentially growing Momentous will mean an upward trajectory for the brand, which has also earned the title of Official Supplements and Sports Nutrition Partner of CrossFit and the CrossFit Games.

“We were immediately drawn to Humble Growth and its partners’ exceptional track record in successfully operating and scaling nutrition and supplement companies,” Byers said. “Their lived experience positions them as invaluable thought partners during our continued growth, and I’m confident that Humble Growth’s passion and expertise for consumer products in this space is going to usher us into an exciting new chapter.”

This article has been updated.

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Supplement companies often get a bad rap, commonly accused of peddling needless and potentially unsafe products backed by questionable science, all at high mark-ups. 

Momentous, an NSF-certified nutrition and supplement brand based in Park City, Utah, is out to change that perception by giving consumers access to high-quality products formulated by experts and designed with specific lifestyle and performance goals in mind.

Led by CEO Jeff Byers, a former NFL offensive lineman turned wellness executive who co-founded Amp Human, Momentous has become one of the industry’s smashing success stories, with revenue growth exceeding 1,000% since the company merged with Amp in 2021. Byers’ vision for Momentous is clear: to democratize high performance by bringing the same health and wellness tools he had access to as a pro athlete to everyday consumers. 

The company’s product line includes staples like Omega-3s, whey protein and creatine monohydrate, but also more targeted supplements like sleep aids, cognitive and athletic performance boosters, and hormone optimizers. Specific collections are also available, including supplement packages curated by experts like Dr. Andrew Huberman.

Along with a booming direct-to-consumer business, Momentous has nearly 200 partnerships with pro and college sports teams in the U.S. and has secured $4.5 million worth of innovation contracts with the Department of Defense to focus on human performance for service members.

Byers spoke with Athletech News about his transition from NFL lineman to wellness CEO, what makes Momentous stand out from other supplement companies, and where he sees the health and wellness market heading over the coming years and decades.

Athletech News: Can you tell us about your background and what led you to create Amp Human?

Jeff Byers: As a former professional athlete, I was really passionate about optimization and performance. When I retired from the NFL, I noticed there was a huge black hole in this space. You go from having access to great practitioners, experts and thought leaders in the space, and being given really curated products geared towards your goals, to this big black hole as an average consumer. So I saw a gap (in the market) to bring together high-quality products with the right practitioners and experts. 

After I decided I wasn’t going to stay in sports, I initially jumped into finance and realized it wasn’t for me, not by a long shot. I joined an early-stage biotech company because they had this technology we thought could be used in sports. That was kind of the genesis of what would become Amp Human and our product, PR Lotion. I thought, “What if we could roll that out to the consumer and build a leading high-performance company to fill this gap? ” So around five years ago, my co-founder Erica Good and I started Amp Human. 

Around two years ago, we bought the Momentous brand and merged into the company. The idea was that nutrition and supplements are such a cornerstone to optimization and health, but there’s still this very big black hole. Our vision is to democratize high performance. We do that through products, knowledge and access.

ATN: What separates Momentous from run-of-the-mill supplement companies?

JB: Supplements to me have a weird connotation, so our goal is to build the “anti-supplement supplement company.” It’s not, “Here are 500 products, go figure out what’s right for you.” Or, “Here’s some cool Fruity Pebbles-flavored protein,” because that’s really where the (supplement) market sits today. We want to be your trusted partner in life optimization.

I believe experts in optimization and wellness don’t live inside businesses, I believe they’re out there doing incredible things at the university level, in pro and college sports, or at the Department of Defense. So if we really want to create a different company, let’s not do it how it’s always been done. Let’s use the external resources – experts and practitioners – and build products around them.

ATN: How do you put that brand philosophy into action?

JB: We have three core pillars that we think are really important. Number one is experts. We align with experts, people like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Andy Galpin, and we also have this incredible performance engineer board that’s made up of top practitioners in pro and college sports. So it’s this expert-driven approach where we work with the best and ideate with the best.

Number two is our endless commitment to product. It’s everything from how we think about sourcing to what products we have – and what products we don’t have –  in our portfolio, to how we certify. There are very few (other) brands out there that certify their entire product line.

Our third pillar is customer experience. To me, this is getting people the right products at the right time. We recently released a new version of our website that allows people to navigate our products based on what we call need spaces – or pillars of optimization – which are Cognitive Function, Sleep, Athletic Performance and Foundational Health (Hormone Support has since been added). 

ATN: Who is Momentous’ target customer?

JB: We’re an aspirational brand, which means we’re built for those who are seeking to make changes in their lives. Our customer is much more of a mindset customer. It’s that continuously curious consumer who is an optimizer. They could be on day one of their optimization journey, but they’re looking to make changes in their life long term. They care about quality, they’re curious about content and are knowledgeable. Those people range from 18-year-olds to 70-year-olds, from male to female, overweight to underweight, from CrossFiters to football players. It’s a pretty deep pool, so we tend to target people not based on demographics but based on psychographics and sociographics. 

ATN: What kinds of work does Momentous do with sports teams and the U.S. government?

JB: We made a custom recovery product for one of the top NFL teams, although I’m not at liberty to say who. We worked with them to source, create and get the right ratios, and now we have a custom product that they use exclusively in their locker room as a competitive advantage. That’s been a really exciting product for us to build to flex some of our bespoke muscles. We’re working on seeing if we can launch it to the public sometime in the next year.

We’re also under contract with the Department of Defense. We’re developing what will hopefully become three novel products over the next two or three years that will be funded by the Department of Defense and clinically validated in top university settings, and then we’ll be able to sell those as well. One of them is a cognitive stimulant, another is around connective tissue health and then the last one will be around hydration.

ATN: Looking ahead, what areas of health and wellness are you most excited about? 

JB: There are two main areas. I’m incredibly passionate about cognitive longevity because it touches me so closely as a former professional athlete and it touches the people I care about. As we age, the likelihood is that our mind is going to go before any else. I think the real goal of longevity will become, Can we make the brain survive long enough or be sharp enough as we all age? One of my most passionate stories is about creatine monohydrate. Most people think creatine is just for bodybuilders and meatheads. But taking creatine monohydrate is one of the most impactful things we can do for long-term brain health. That’s the education aspect we need to bring and the difference we want to make for consumers. 

Number two is, there’s a lot of misinformation about female health. There’s not a ton of great clinical research around female health, so it just needs to be invested in and better understood across the board. Males and females are completely different, so I think there’s a great opportunity for us to help champion female performance and female longevity.

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