Who Owns Prime Hydration? Not Really Logan Paul or KSI — It's Congo Brands

Prime Hydration is sold, visually and verbally, as Logan Paul and KSI’s company — their faces are on the bottle, their feud-turned-friendship is the entire origin story, their names are what a shopper actually recognizes on the shelf. Neither of them controls it. A private beverage company almost nobody outside the industry had heard of does — and while Prime’s own sales have been collapsing through 2025 and 2026, that company’s actual founders just cashed out nearly $2 billion on a different energy drink most casual buyers have never connected to Prime at all.

The company behind the company

Prime Hydration LLC operates under Congo Brands (also filed in some records as Congo LLC), a beverage-incubator business founded in 2019 by Max Clemons and Trey Steiger and headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Congo Brands expanded that Louisville headquarters in 2023 in an $8.25 million project the state of Kentucky said would create 500 jobs — the footprint of an operating company, not a marketing shell built around two YouTubers.

Kentucky Secretary of State corporate filings list Steiger and Clemons, not Paul or KSI, as the entity’s registered officers. Food Republic, reporting specifically on the question of who owns Prime, found the same pattern: Paul and KSI are widely reported to hold equity in the business, but neither Congo Brands, Paul, KSI, nor any public filing has ever disclosed the actual percentages. A specific “20/20/60” split — Congo Brands 60%, Paul and KSI 20% each — circulates on multiple sites, but every instance of it traces back to low-quality aggregator content, not to any of the parties involved or a regulatory record. This piece isn’t asserting that number.

Paul and KSI aren’t nobodies in this story — they built the audience that took Prime from zero to a billion-dollar sales run in under two years, per Bloomberg’s reporting. But the company structure underneath that audience was never really theirs to begin with, and that distinction is the whole point of an ownership-economics piece: the face of a brand and the owner of a brand are frequently different people, and the difference only becomes visible when something goes wrong.

What Congo Brands’ founders did with their other drink

Prime wasn’t Congo Brands’ only bet. The same company also built Alani Nu, a separate energy-drink brand co-founded by Katy and Haydn Schneider. On February 20, 2025, Celsius Holdings announced it would acquire Alani Nu in a deal with a gross value of $1.8 billion — a net purchase price of $1.65 billion once $150 million in tax assets are backed out, structured as $1.275 billion in cash, a $25 million earn-out and $500 million in newly issued Celsius stock, according to Celsius’s own announcement and corroborating trade coverage from BevNET, Brewbound, Just Drinks and Nasdaq’s press-release syndication.

The sellers named in that deal weren’t only Alani Nu’s own founders. Celsius’s announcement and the trade press covering it both named Congo Brands co-founders Max Clemons and Trey Steiger as sellers alongside the Schneiders — direct, multi-outlet confirmation that Prime’s controlling company is the same one that just converted a second beverage brand into a nine-figure-plus personal payday for its two founders, closing in the second quarter of 2025.

That timing matters, because it landed in almost the exact window Prime itself started falling apart.

The numbers on the brand with the famous faces

Two separate, independently sourced data sets both show the same UK collapse, measured different ways:

Retail sell-through. NIQ (NielsenIQ) data, cited in The Grocer’s 2024 Top Products Survey and reported by Marketing Week, put Prime’s UK retail sales at £68 million for the year to early September 2024 — down 48% from £131.1 million a year earlier, the steepest decline of any food or drink brand tracked in that survey.

The UK entity’s own books. Separately, Prime Hydration UK Ltd’s accounts filed with Companies House — reported by City AM and independently by Grocery Gazette — show a different but consistent story for its most recent reported financial year: turnover down from £112.2 million to £32.8 million, a decline of more than 70%; gross profit down 85%, from £21.6 million to £3.1 million; pre-tax profit down from £4.3 million to £940,458; and net profit down 91.6%, from £3.7 million to £312,393. The filing’s directors said the UK entity was “now entering a strategic review process to transition from an initial hyper growth phase to a more sustainable, long-term presence in the market.”

Those two measurements cover different things — one is what retailers rang up at the till, the other is what the UK company itself booked and filed — and shouldn’t be read as the same number twice. Read together, they say the same thing two different ways: Prime’s UK business shrank drastically in the same stretch Congo Brands’ founders were finalizing a $1.8 billion exit on their other brand.

Then Australia

The Australian arm went further than a bad year. Congo Brands Australia Pty Ltd, the Melbourne-based distributor of Prime in that market, entered voluntary administration on July 7, 2026, with Alice Ruhe of The Ruhe Group appointed as administrator, according to Insolvency Insider Australia. The trigger was a Federal Court winding-up application filed by packaging supplier Orora Group in June 2026. By the time administrators stepped in, the distributor reported less than $85,000 in cash against roughly $7.9 million in liabilities, a $1.4 million net loss, and inventory that had been written down from $28.9 million to $1.7 million — a $4.6 million writedown. Its revenue had already fallen from about $31 million in FY23 to about $14.5 million in FY24, per the same reporting.

Insolvency Insider Australia’s coverage is explicit about how it frames Paul and KSI in this story: it describes them as the brand’s promoters, not its owners — the same distinction that runs through every part of this piece.

The takeaway

Two things are true about Congo Brands at the same time, and both are documented: it built the biggest celebrity-fronted energy-drink brand of the last several years, and in 2025 it converted a second brand into a $1.8 billion payday for its actual founders. Neither fact depends on Logan Paul or KSI’s name. What’s happening to Prime — a near-halving of UK retail sales in a single year by NIQ’s count, a steeper collapse in the UK company’s own filed accounts, and an Australian distributor now in administration — is happening to the brand with their faces on it, not to the company that built it. That’s the asymmetry this beat keeps finding in celebrity-branded consumer products: the person whose name sells the product and the entity that owns the economics of it are very often not the same party, and the gap tends to show up first when the sales numbers turn.

More ownership breakdowns: who owns Kylie Cosmetics, who owns SKIMS, and whether Ryan Reynolds owns Stok Cold Brew.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Prime Hydration? Congo Brands (also filed as Congo LLC), a privately held beverage company founded in 2019 by Max Clemons and Trey Steiger and based in Louisville, Kentucky, controls Prime Hydration LLC. Kentucky Secretary of State filings list Steiger and Clemons as the entity’s officers — not Logan Paul or KSI. Multiple outlets report that Paul and KSI also hold equity in the company, but no party has officially disclosed the exact ownership percentages.

How much of Prime do Logan Paul and KSI actually own? It has never been officially disclosed. A specific “20/20/60” split (Congo Brands 60%, Paul and KSI 20% each) circulates widely online, but it traces to low-quality aggregator and content-farm sites, not to Congo Brands, Paul, KSI, or any regulatory filing. Food Republic, reporting directly on this question, found no confirmed percentage breakdown — only that Congo Brands, via Kentucky state filings, controls the entity that Paul and KSI front.

What is Congo Brands, and what else does it own? Congo Brands is a Louisville, Kentucky beverage-incubator company founded in 2019 by Max Clemons and Trey Steiger, which expanded its Louisville headquarters in 2023 in an $8.25 million project projected to create 500 jobs. Besides Prime Hydration, its portfolio has included Alani Nu and 3D Energy. On Feb. 20, 2025, Celsius Holdings announced it would acquire Alani Nu for a gross $1.8 billion, with Clemons and Steiger named among the sellers alongside Alani Nu’s own co-founders, Katy and Haydn Schneider.

Is Prime Hydration going out of business? Its numbers have collapsed sharply in multiple markets, though the US parent company has not filed for bankruptcy or ceased operating as of this writing. NIQ data cited by Marketing Week put UK sales down 48% for the year to early September 2024; Prime Hydration UK Ltd’s own Companies House filings separately show turnover down more than 70% and net profit down 91.6% in its most recent reported year, prompting a formal strategic review. In Australia, distributor Congo Brands Australia Pty Ltd entered voluntary administration on July 7, 2026, per Insolvency Insider Australia, after a winding-up application from packaging supplier Orora Group and a slide in revenue from roughly $31 million to $14.5 million between FY23 and FY24.