Cirkul

Beverages/DTCUSA

New to Unitard

✂️ Markdown

Peak $1 BillionToday

~-30%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
~2022
📈
Peak valuation
$1 Billion ’22
💔
Became a Unitard
~2023
💸
Last valuation
~$700M

Current status

PitchBook est. $696M (Dec 2025)

The rise & fall

5 moments · 2015–2025

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

Oct 28 ’15

Founded by two Dartmouth teammates

Garrett Waggoner and Andrew Gay design a water bottle with twist-to-flavor cartridges to make plain water less boring.

TechCrunch

2022

The peak: a ~$1B unicorn mark$1B

Flavor-cartridge subscriptions boom and estimates put the DTC bottler at unicorn status.

PitchBook

2023

Slips out of the club

PitchBook's model puts the valuation at about $696M (end of 2025) — roughly 30% under the $1B line.

PitchBook

2023–25

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2023–25

Glassdoor reviews described spending that swung from a Super Bowl ad to abrupt cuts — the entire field-marketing team, employees said, let go days after the 2025 game — with later layoff rounds leaving staff little visibility into how the company was performing.

Today

Still private — the funds keep marking

Nomura Alternative Income Fund marks it at $0.90/share · -93% from its peak mark · as of Mar 2026

SEC NPORT-P

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Cirkul is a US direct-to-consumer beverage company selling water bottles with flavor cartridges, and was estimated to reach a ~$1B valuation around 2022. Amid a broader markdown of DTC startups, third-party estimates (PitchBook) put it at about $696M at the end of 2025, roughly 30% under the $1B unicorn mark.

Mutual-fund markdowns

2 funds · SEC NPORT-P

How U.S. mutual funds fair-value this still-private company in their quarterly SEC filings.

Per-share mark from peak

-93%

Nomura Alternative Income Fund

$13.73 → $0.90

as of Mar 2026

Fund	Class	$/sh	From peak	As of
Nomura Alternative Income Fund		$0.90	-93%	Mar 2026
BlackRock Strategic Global Bond Fund, Inc.		$0.78	-20%	Mar 2026

Source: SEC EDGAR Form NPORT-P (Level-3 fair-value marks). Per-share marks reflect the fund’s own valuation of a specific share class and aren’t a company-wide valuation. Last refreshed Jun 2026.

Source: PitchBook model estimate as of Dec 31, 2025 (CNBC's fallen-unicorn table, Jun 2026), not a priced round

Founders

Garrett Waggoner
co-founder & CEO
Still there — CEO/FounderLinkedIn ↗
Andy Gay
co-founder & president
No public profile matched