It’s not every day that a bank approaches an entrepreneur and offers to raise more than $400 million in debt to help them control nearly all outside investment in the business, but that’s what happened in August 2025 when 10 Capital One bankers sat down with MaryRuth Ghiyam, the founder of MaryRuth’s, an organic supplements company based in Los Angeles.
“They really went to bat for me,” says Ghiyam, 41, who is co-CEO of the company. (The other co-CEO is Jonathan Klein, who assumed the title in April 2025 after serving as chief legal officer for the prior five years.)
Ethan Pines for Forbes
Ghiyam was no stranger to Capital One. After she founded the business in 2014, Ghiyam covered early expenses by racking up thousands of dollars on her Capital One Spark card. Ghiyam says the business, which sells liquid vitamins, gummies and other supplements in more than 300 different forms, has been profitable since day one. MaryRuth’s is now an estimated $600 million (trailing 12-month revenue) business with an estimated EBITDA profit of $125 million, or margins of about 20%. Even after accounting for the $420 million in debt Capital One raised for the business (putting in a large chunk itself), Forbes estimates that the company is worth at least $1.5 billion.
“My face is on the bottle. Most consumers think that I’m an avatar or a cartoon, which I like. I use that when we raise money,” says Ghiyam. “I always say, ‘The brand is never about me.’ They don’t even know I exist.”
The Capital One deal, which closed in October 2025 and sets the loan due date in 2030, helped the former holistic health coach maintain roughly 97% ownership for herself and her family.
That structure would have made Ghiyam a new billionaire worth an estimated $1.5 billion, but two years ago, after she and her husband, David Ghiyam, split up, she signed a post-nuptial agreement that entitled him to half of any MaryRuth’s sale, while she is also entitled to half the proceeds if he ever sells his AI-enabled spiritual coaching business called David AI. (Ghiyam, who started MaryRuth’s before she got married, gave her mother, Colleen, the business’s original chief financial officer, an ownership stake early on and she still has some shares, which Forbes includes in its estimate of Ghiyam’s total shares.) Forbes estimates that Ghiyam is worth some $750 million.
Strong profitability has made MaryRuth’s an acquisition target over the years, and, long before Capital One called, Ghiyam turned down nine-figure offers from food conglomerates, including institutions such as Blackstone.
“If you have profit,” she says, “you have free will.”
It hasn’t always been easy financially for Ghiyam. When she started MaryRuth’s, she was on the hook for $700,000 of her mother’s personal debt. She didn’t pay herself a salary for nine years.
“It’s not easy,” she adds. “It’s been a long journey.”
Ghiyam grew up in Somerville, New Jersey. Her father was a lawyer who owned a lumber and millwork business and died when she was seven. Ghiyam’s mother took over the family business and she ran it until it went bankrupt during the housing market crash in the late 2000s, racking up personal credit card debt along the way.
Ghiyam was a real estate agent for Douglas Elliman for a few years before she started a private holistic health practice in New York City in March 2013. She found herself advocating for liquid supplements because taking capsules on an empty stomach often leads to nausea. But there weren’t good liquid supplements for sale in stores or online, so she decided to make her own.
“This should be in everyone’s fridge,“ says MaryRuth Ghiyam, “the way that Arm & Hammer baking soda has 95% household penetration.“
Her original concept was she would sell large bottles of a liquid morning vitamin and another for nighttime–one supplement bottle that an entire family could take. “A shot in the morning, a shot before bed,” Ghiyam says.
Her first product, a raspberry-flavored morning liquid multivitamin, which launched on Amazon in the fall of 2014 “could be ubiquitous–globally, everywhere, all the time, like Coca-Cola,” says Ghiyam. “This should be in everyone’s fridge the way that Arm & Hammer baking soda has 95% household penetration.”
Health And Wealth: MaryRuth’s products include liquid vitamins, gummies and other supplements in more than 300 different forms
MaryRuth Organics
During the early days of Mary Ruth’s, Ghiyam says it was her Capital One card, with its $50,000 limit, that allowed her to manage the brand’s cash flow, which could sometimes be negative. That’s because even though the brand was profitable, manufacturers demand cash up front and nationwide retailers require order sizes that can each cost five to seven figures-plus, and products don’t earn back for several months.
Three years into founding MaryRuth’s, Ghiyam paid off her mother’s debt, moved from New York to L.A. and had her second child. It was a lot. So, in 2018, when Ghiyam was pouring everything she made back into the business and described herself as “broke,” her manufacturer in Texas offered her $1 million for 10% of the business, she was very tempted. But she turned down the offer, she says, after she saw employees of the manufacturer smoking cigarettes. She felt it presented a conflict to her brand, which at that point had $11 million in annual sales and nearly 20% EBITDA margins.
The next three years, during which she gave birth to twins, Ghiyam describes as “the hardest.” By 2019, six years into the business, MaryRuth’s was bringing in $23 million in annual revenue. Then the pandemic had more people than ever both buying supplements and shopping online, which boosted sales nearly three times over to $84 million.
But Ghiyam “still didn’t think we were safe.” She had no idea about how valuations worked. “We weren’t thinking about multiples,” she recalls.
In 2021, all of that changed. Fort Worth-based TPG Capital approached Ghiyam, whose business had grown over 60% to $135 million in annual sales. As she recalls, TPG offered Ghiyam a deal that valued her business at $250 million, or a multiple of 1.85 times sales.
“We didn’t even have a banker,” Ghiyam recalls.
She then fielded more offers, and the valuation doubled. She recalls Boston-based private equity firm Summit Partners valued the business around $500 million, as did Los Angeles-based Butterfly Equity. New York City based alternative asset manager Blackstone bid higher at about $525 million. Ghiyam turned down Blackstone, she says, because their deal would have had her “step down day one.” She was going to sign with Summit and Butterfly for 20% stakes each, but then Summit dropped out. In August 2021, Ghiyam agreed to go with Butterfly, which got about 40% and ultimately valued the business around $400 million.
Ghiyam says the investors “demanded excellence” and helped the business more than double annual sales to more than $270 million by 2023. “They are tough graders and never really told me that I was doing a good job, but it made me work so hard,” Ghiyam recalls.
“Sometimes rejection is protection,“Ghiyam says. “We’re a highly profitable company. We still had a failed process.“
Just two years into the deal, Butterfly Equity, which has also invested in the restaurant chain Qdoba, baby carrot processor Bolthouse Fresh Foods and Duckhorn wines, told Ghiyam that they “needed to sell” and “give money back to investors,” according to Ghiyam. Butterfly denies this.
Butterfly says the firm wanted to exit because the business was performing well and had received some interest from potential buyers, so they decided to explore a potential transaction. It’s still a short hold, even by private equity standards, where firms typically look to exit within three to five years.
The week prior to Ghiyam putting the business up for sale, she and her husband broke up. Then, as the roadshow started, she saw the valuation double yet again, as offers rolled in at $800 million and $900 million valuations.
At first, Ghiyam and the board decided they wanted to sell to Boston-based Advent International, she recalls, but then the $94 billion (assets under management) buyout shop never placed a final bid. (Advent declined to comment.) Ghiyam recalls that “they didn’t believe we could do the numbers we said we could do, but we actually crushed them.” (The business projected it would hit $89 million in EBITDA in 2025, and MaryRuth’s actually ended up topping $100 million in EBITDA for the first time that year.)
“Sometimes rejection is protection,” Ghiyam says. “We’re a highly profitable company. We still had a failed process.”
Butterfly continued to push for an exit. Eventually they secured a deal where New York City based King Street got a little under 3% ownership and Butterfly rolled over $50 million into King Street. Ghiyam also bought more shares, ending with 97% ownership.
Yet the financing rollercoaster wasn’t over. Ghiyam soon heard from Paul Baisley at Capital One, a managing director who heads up food and beverage deals for its commercial bank. MaryRuth’s ended up with $420 million in debt on its books, but given its high profitability, that wouldn’t be too much trouble to pay down.
Baisley, whose division has deals worth a total of $7 billion in debt across 140 different borrowers, says MaryRuth’s impressed him as one of private consumer packaged goods companies that is “actually doing better” than larger, publicly traded ones.
“What I loved about MaryRuth and her approach is, it’s very data-driven. She talks about the green shoots, following where her clients want to play,” says Baisley. “If people are pivoting to creatine, she can pivot to creatine. If people are focusing on more gummy bears, she can do that. If it’s a liquid vitamin, she can do that. She’s very good at finding those green shoots.”
The concept of “finding the green shoots” is one that Baisley now employs regularly with his team and other founders. “We’ve been with her from the beginning,” says Baisley, “we think she’s got a long runway and that this is just the beginning.”
Ghiyam may even be featured on a Capital One commercial.
But it still could not be enough, and Ghiyam may be getting ready to give up control of MaryRuth’s entirely.
“It is very scary. Now people can make my company in two years with 10 employees,” says Ghiyam, in an apparent reference to the recent acquisition of Grüns, which sold an 80% stake to Unilever for about $900 million, or roughly four times sales, in a major deal announced in April.
Grüns was founded in 2023 by Chad Janis, a then-31-year-old who left the private equity firm where he worked, Summit Partners, to get an MBA at Stanford, where he started the gummy supplement brand. It now has annual revenue of roughly half of MaryRuth’s. Forbes estimates that Janis pocked about $300 million after taxes in the deal, which closed in June and values the business at over $1 billion, and that Janis owns most of the 20% of the company that Unilever has yet to acquire. (Unilever noted in a recent filing that it took out debt to cover the future purchase of the remaining interest.)
Janis started the business, Ghiyam claims, after being part of the team at Summit that did due diligence on MaryRuth’s back in 2021. Janis declined to comment.
The experience has stuck with Ghiyam, who says she used to want to own the company and keep it private longterm. Plus, now that she is getting divorced, she is considering starting another MaryRuth’s roadshow. “I might need to sell this company,” she says, “but still work at the company.”
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