This investment story is 24 months in the making. 

It shows how lotza variables need to come together - team, category, opportunity, and taste, to name a few.

Let’s get into it. 

Lotza

Lotza is The Soda Made to Party™ - a better-for-you soda that pairs perfectly with your spirit of choice - vodka, tequila, etc. It contains mood-boosting adaptogens as well as functional ingredients that help mitigate the negative effects of alcohol. While other brands fight for daily wellness, Lotza wins modern social drinking.

The First Impression

My first impression of Lotza was very strong. But it wasn’t on the product. It was something that I didn’t expect - the brand and the messaging. 

On the website reach out, Founder and CEO Laura Markewicz included a gated link to her pitch deck. That’s when the “a ha”moments began:

It was tasteful. It was colorful. It was attention grabbing. It was starkly different from the sea of sameness of most startups. 

Through the link, I accessed a pitch deck that had a voiceover from Laura talking through each slide. 

Her energy even from the audio recording broke through. 

She also asked a key, piercing question: 

“What is something that we all want more of? (And don’t say money)

Fun!”

The problem is, the alcohol, the late nights… make us compromise to not have fun because we don’t want to pay for it the next day.

My First Zoom Call

My I got on the first Zoom call with Laura on January 23, 2024, nearly almost two years before Tundra Angels made an investment. 

My first conversation with Laura was great. Laura was awesome enough to ship a box of Lotza to me shortly after our conversation. 

The unboxing was memorable. Everything was packaged so well with a one-pager to share the ingredients. I remember my first sip. "Holy cow, that's good!”

I paid attention to my body’s involuntary reaction. A few seconds later, I involuntarily reached for another sip. 

Something else happened. I noticed a positive effect on my mood after drinking it. 

Days later, when I ran out of the twelve-pack that she sent, I was genuinely bummed. That emotional bummed out feeling was an important signal to me. The product had hooked me, and I wanted more. 

What Laura Had Achieved

I want to call out something specific. At this point, Laura had accomplished something that many startups either don’t think about or don’t know how to achieve. She had achieved a compelling brand and brand presence. That is, every touch point had sublime parity with the touch point before it.  

Every touch point either an email, or the pitch deck colors, to her energetic voiceover, to the way that she positioned what she was doing, to the product itself, the unboxing, the taste itself of the product… 

The aggregate of those touch points was head and shoulders above other startups that I came across at this stage of a company. As an investor, I paid attention to that. Having such a mature brand at an early stage… just doesn’t happen. 

But I also paid attention to something else - you’d have to meet Laura to know this, but Laura, with her energy and charisma, has a way of lighting up a room or a conversation. Just like her pitch deck, the colors, the brand presence. 

I came to see - Laura was her brand. The energy, the mosaic of the color palate, the touch points. Laura is Lotza. 

I do not recall a time in my investing journey thus far when the founder so effervescently embodied the brand they created and the brand embodied them. 

Why Tundra Angels Invested in Lotza

1) Laura's Marketing Prowess 

Laura is an anomaly among beverage entrepreneurs. 

Most beverage entrepreneurs do not come from both strategic and tactical marketing. Most tend to come from another industry altogether. This isn’t just my experience as an investor, but this point was also raised independently by Adam Kroener of Carbliss. 

One of Laura’s asymmetric advantages out of the gate is that she is a former marketing executive turned beverage entrepreneur. She has scaled many brands before. She is fluent in areas where other beverage startup founders would be out of their league - with scaling paid ads, with optimizing cost-per-click, in building funnels, with in-person activations, etc. In so many areas where other beverage entrepreneurs are learning by doing, Laura is successfully converting because she’s done it so many times before. That gave us incredible confidence in the opportunity. 

This expertise is also the reason why her brand was so mature at such an early stage. It all fit together. 

Additionally, her level of tactical execution is unmistakable. I recall one time when we had a conversation where I gave some feedback around her current GTM direction. Laura came back on our next Zoom call with a 8-9 page document on an adjusted plan and strategy, highly tactical, with unit economics, with funnel stages, etc.

2) Creating a New Product Category

Tundra Angels invests in any industry, but we know that the CPG space has variables at play that are not present in other markets or go-to-market motions. For one, defense moats are more difficult to achieve in the CPG space because it requires much more scale of customers to achieve defensibility. Two of the major defensibility mechanisms are brand and speed to scale. 

So we spent time in due diligence measuring the brand power and defensibility.  

A powerful way to build an enduring brand is by category creation - creating, defining, and owning a clear market category. If a product can be positioned as the de facto standard for a new category, then it has a disproportionately higher level of success than others. That startup does something important - it tells the market how to categorize and to not categorize them. Products such as 5 Hour Energy have done a great job defining and owning a market category, as compared to Red Bull, Monster, that are playing in their own category. 

Laura knew this intuitively. Over time, I witnessed that Laura was on a discovery mission of finding the right use case and category for the product where it would just click in the consumer’s mind. 

Laura would get feedback from her customers and learn that people enjoyed the product but didn’t have a category for it. Her customers would ask, “What context do I drink it in? Do I drink it without alcohol? Do I drink it with alcohol?” In essence, how does Lotza fit into my life and in a market where many options exist? So, Laura experimented with positioning on various iterations and categories over the course of the last two years. 

In the Fall 2025, I met her again through the gener8tor investor swarm. Before she started, she said, “Matthew, I think you’re really going to like the new direction here.” 

She got into it. 

“Soda shows up at 90% of drinking occasions but is filled with sugar and ingredients that destroy your mood and health. 

Lotza is the first soda made to party.” 

She went on to share that sodas are the #1 choice for non-alcoholic celebratory moments. 1 in 3 sodas is consumed in celebratory, social, party-style occasions as a mixer and solo as an NA option. That’s a $10B+ soda usage occasion that no brand is owning with intentionality, flavor, function, or identity.

I had seen the future. The future of what people at social gatherings didn’t know they were missing.

When I heard it, it clicked. That’s it. That’s the category. It was unmistakable. 

But the category wasn’t defined, nor had a product to fit it. Lotza was it. 

Lotza is the soda made to party. 

Any startup, but especially in the challenging motion of CPG, need all the leverage they can acquire to be successful. And many do not because they fall into the “me too” category of product sameness. 

Brands have an asymmetric likelihood of winning in the market if they can create, define, and own a category. The vast majority of brands cannot and do not. Lotza now possessed an asymmetric advantage to build a brand that would remain defensible for the long haul. 

3) A Key Piece of the Investment Puzzle

I liked everything about the opportunity at this point. But there was one key piece of the puzzle that had not yet fallen into place. 

Two of Tundra Angels’ investors were Adam and Amanda Kroener, Co-Founders of Carbliss, the ready-to-drink cocktail that was founded in 2019 has caught fire over the last few years. It revenue growth of 27,127% it was ranked No. 7 overall in the nation on the Inc 5000 in 2024. 

Adam and Amanda possess expertise in the space that Tundra Angels members did not - the macro and micro view of the alcoholic beverage ecosystem. They saw the trends, the signals on the horizon, etc. 

I didn’t want to move Lotza forward in our process and potential investment without the backing and conviction of Adam on the opportunity. In my head, if Adam were to get behind Laura in some way, it would be an emphatic statement to the rest of the Tundra Angels network on the conviction of the opportunity. 

But just like other investors on Tundra Angels relative to a strategic opportunity, I wasn’t forcing anything. Adam’s support and conviction on Lotza needed to happen organically. 

Time passed with Laura and I staying in touch in early to mid-2025. 

In the Fall, I had a call with Laura. She excitedly mentioned that Adam was officially coming on as an advisor to Lotza! 

The best-case scenario I had dreamed of happening came through! The last piece on my mental Lotza chess board just moved. I knew that Adam would be able to provide his insights to the rest of Tundra Angels on why he has conviction on what Lotza is doing.

Sure enough, Adam provided insights through our due diligence process about his strong conviction on Laura, the opportunity, the product, and her execution to date. Adam’s insights were instrumental in Tundra Angels’ decision.  

Closing Thoughts

Why Tundra Angels chose to invest in Lotza is because, among many things, we believed in Laura, we believed in the future category, and we believed in the expertise of one of our own investors. 

Laura also brought something that is often devoid of investment deals - fun. She brought fun, enthusiasm, and an effervescent feel to what may be an otherwise technical process of doing due diligence on a startup. 

Even though the title of this article is “Why Tundra Angels invested in Lotza.” I would posture that the question really is, “How could we not?”

There are Lotza reasons to be bullish on Lotza. 

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