Butter-in-Coffee Company Bulletproof Secures $9 Million Investment

Bulletproof Facebook photo

The latest coffee-focused business to receive multimillion dollar backing for retail expansion and product development is Bulletproof, the company that puts butter in coffee and refers to everything it does as hacking.

Trinity Ventures has signed a $9 million check for Bulletproof, the brand founded by entrepreneur Dave Asprey, who has authored books, hosted a podcast and built something of a specialty food/health empire based around infusing coffee with butter and a proprietary medium-chain triglyceride oil blend — all part of the lifestyle focused Bulletproof brand. Asprey most recently opened a Bulletproof-branded shop in Santa Monica, and the Trinity Ventures investment is likely to result in more.

For those of you who have managed to miss the many headlines about Bulletproof coffee, Asprey claims it results in numerous health benefits, including but not limited to  “brain upgrades,” “biological age reductions” and significant weight loss. The veracity of these claims is largely untested by third-party sources, but Asprey naturally swears by the stuff. And it’s no coincidence that Asprey’s Silicon Valley partner here is Trinity Ventures. He joined the firm in 2010 before developing the Bulletproof line.

“Picking the right investors was crucial,” Asprey said in an an announcement earlier today. “This was about finding people with passion who I could trust. With brands like PF Chang’s and Jamba Juice in the firm’s portfolio, Trinity’s experience in this space is unparalleled.”

Trinity actually has only a small handful of food-and-drink-related investments — the bulk of its portfolio consists of tech companies. As part of the deal, Trinity’s Gus Tai and Dan Scholnick will join Bulletproof’s board of investors. The announcement came as Bulletproof launched a new RTD drink product, called Fatwater, for what it describes as “extreme hydration.”