Liquid Death

GitPod

Liquid Death

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) — Liquid Death sells canned water and flavored beverages through retail stores, Amazon, and DTC. Revenue comes from wholesale to retailers (7-Eleven, Whole Foods, Target, Walmart) and direct online sales.

The aluminum can format commands a premium over plastic water bottles — a single tallboy typically retails for $1.89 to $2.49, significantly more than a bottle of Dasani. The brand licensing and merchandise arm (selling branded t-shirts, hats, and absurd limited-edition products) adds high-margin revenue.

Advertising partnerships and brand collaborations provide additional income. The company has a subscription model called the "Country Club" for DTC recurring orders.

GitPod

GitPod started as freemium: a free tier of monthly cloud hours, paid plans for more hours and bigger workspaces, and enterprise contracts with self-hosted and dedicated options. As Ona it shifted toward enterprise contracts for running AI coding agents inside a customer's own cloud, with governance and security controls.

It said enterprise annual recurring revenue quadrupled year over year before the rename. OpenAI acquired the company in 2026, and existing customer commitments continue to be supported.

Liquid Death

Mike Cessario was a creative director who had worked at Netflix and various ad agencies. He noticed something at concerts and punk shows: everyone was drinking water out of plastic bottles, but nobody wanted to be seen doing it because water bottles looked lame next to a can of beer.

The branding insight was almost stupidly simple — put water in a tallboy can with aggressive heavy metal aesthetics, give it the most ridiculous name possible, and market it like an energy drink. He made a Facebook ad in 2018 for a product that didn't exist yet.

The ad went viral with 3 million views. He used the viral proof to raise seed funding and actually make the product.

The first cans shipped in 2019. By 2022, Liquid Death was in 60,000 retail locations and valued at over a billion dollars.

All from water in a can.

GitPod

The GitPod team came out of TypeFox, a German developer tools company in Kiel behind the Theia cloud IDE framework. Sven Efftinge and his colleagues realized the biggest pain point was not the editor itself but the environment.

Developers spent hours configuring machines, installing dependencies and debugging "it works on my machine" problems.

They launched GitPod to provide instant, automated cloud development environments. One click from a GitHub or GitLab repo opened a fully configured workspace with dependencies installed and tools ready.

Johannes Landgraf, who became CEO, and CTO Christian Weichel later led the company through its rename to Ona in 2025 and its sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Liquid Death

Content-first marketing that acts like an entertainment company, not a beverage company. Liquid Death's social media posts, videos, and stunts generate millions of organic views — they've had a witch hex their water, made a real music album from hate comments, and partnered with adult film star Cherie DeVille for a commercial.

Retail distribution expansion from specialty stores to mass market (Walmart, Target, 7-Eleven). The aluminum can itself is a growth strategy — sustainability-minded consumers prefer cans over plastic, giving Liquid Death a values-based selling point beyond the comedy.

Celebrity investors (Tony Hawk, Steve Aoki, Wiz Khalifa) provided credibility and reach. Festival and live event sponsorships position the brand where its core demographic gathers.

The brand's absurdity is the moat — nobody else can copy the tone without looking like they're trying.

GitPod

GitPod grew through open source community adoption and one-click integrations with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, where a "Gitpod" button on a repo launched a ready workspace. It later moved upmarket to banks and pharmaceutical companies that wanted cloud development under tight security.

In 2025 it bet the company on AI agents, renaming itself Ona and claiming its own agents were producing most of its merged code. That bet ended in a sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Liquid Death

It's still water. The product itself has zero differentiation from any other mountain spring water — the entire value is brand and marketing.

If the comedy stops being funny or the brand loses cultural relevance, there's nothing proprietary underneath. CPG margins are thin and retail shelf space is brutally competitive.

Scaling a premium water brand into mass market means competing on price with Coca-Cola (Dasani) and PepsiCo (Aquafina) who have unlimited distribution muscle. The $1.4 billion valuation requires the company to grow into a full beverage platform, not just a water brand — hence the expansion into iced tea and flavored water.

And there's a real question about whether the ironic marketing can sustain long-term or whether it's a cycle that peaks and fades.

GitPod

GitHub Codespaces, backed by Microsoft and GitHub's enormous distribution, was a direct competitor, and AWS stopped taking new Cloud9 customers in 2024, a sign of how tough the cloud IDE market was. Convincing developers to give up their carefully configured laptops proved hard.

Then AI coding tools threatened to make the whole category a feature. GitPod's answer was to reinvent itself as Ona, an AI agent platform, and ultimately to sell to OpenAI in 2026 rather than compete alone.

Liquid Death

Mountain Water — still water sourced from the Austrian Alps, sold in 16.9 oz and 19.2 oz tallboy cans. Sparkling Water — same Alpine source, carbonated.

Flavored sparkling water in flavors like Severed Lime, Berry It Alive, and Mango Chainsaw — names that sound like horror movies. Iced tea line expanding beyond water into flavored beverages.

The Country Club subscription for recurring DTC delivery. Merchandise and limited-edition collaborations — from branded caskets to a $50,000 enema kit that sold out.

Every product name and packaging decision is designed to be the opposite of what a water brand would normally do.

GitPod

Before 2025: cloud development environments, instant pre-configured workspaces defined in a .gitpod.yml file, with prebuilds and support for VS Code and JetBrains, plus a self-hosted enterprise option. As Ona (since September 2025): a platform for running software engineering AI agents in secure, sandboxed cloud environments, with VS Code in the browser and access from phone, tablet or laptop.

Since August 2026 the technology is part of OpenAI's Codex team.

Liquid Death

Investors include Science Inc., Velvet Sea Ventures, Live Nation Entertainment, Conviction Partners, and celebrity investors including Tony Hawk, Steve Aoki, and Wiz Khalifa. Series D in 2022 valued the company at $700 million.

By 2023, valuation reached $1.4 billion.

GitPod

Speedinvest led the $3 million seed in October 2020, with Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures US. General Catalyst led a $13 million round in April 2021.

GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner led the $25 million Series A in November 2022. Total funding was about $41 million.