Righteous Felon has the kind of origin story you swear was written by a novelist who snacks too much. A 12-year-old Brendan Cawley turns birthday money into a $30 dehydrator, recruits friends Tucker Rinehart and Kyle Whitmore, and starts moving jerky through middle school hallways like a protein packed underground economy. That spark never died. It just matured, lifted weights, learned finance, and reemerged in 2012 as a craft meat snack brand that refused to play small. Now it is RTZN Brands, it is national, and it just secured a strategic investment from GroundForce Capital. The round stays undisclosed, but the message is loud enough to rattle a cattle fence. GroundForce Capital only backs brands built to scale, and Righteous Felon has been outrunning its resource base for years.
Brendan Cawley and CFO COO David Martinsek did not rely on hype. They built a machine. 100% YTD gross sales growth. 120% revenue growth through Nov 2024. Subscriptions up 485%. Active subs up 117%. 10K+ retail doors. Over 6.3M customers reached. Those are not numbers. Those are signals. They say the market is tired of cardboard-chewing jerky and ready for flavor that actually feels alive. And when operators like Mark Rampolla and Dan Gluck step in, it is because they see momentum that does not bluff. You do not get the founder of ZICO and the co-founder of Health Warrior leaning in unless the brand’s trajectory looks undeniable.
Collin Phelan has been running the ecommerce side with the composure of someone who enjoys turning chaos into recurring revenue. Smartrr integration transformed a simple DTC presence into a loyalty engine where skip, swap, and customize feels effortless and addictive. Meanwhile, the team behind the curtain brings the outlaw energy that built the brand’s identity. Arielle The First Lady of Flavor keeps the profiles bold. Monica MONARCHY Fred drives marketplace ops with precision. Dan Snack Smuggler Klausner pushes wholesale expansion across club, convenience, travel, hospitality, and pro sports channels. This is not a team following a blueprint. This is a crew crafting a category.
GroundForce Capital saw exactly what consumers have been shouting with their wallets. Clean ingredients. USDA inspected small-batch production in Gettysburg. Pasture-raised Black Angus from Roseda Farms. A flavor lineup that reads like a mixtape. A brand with personality in a category that spent years pretending personality was optional. The better-for-you protein market is growing fast, and there is a wide opening for a company offering twice the quality of legacy jerky at roughly 1.25x the price. Righteous Felon is walking straight into that opening before the old guard even realizes the door is unlocked.
This partnership is not just capital. It is acceleration. It is a signal that the category is shifting and that Righteous Felon is positioned to become its center of gravity. If history is a guide, Brendan Cawley and his crew will scale the same way they started: creatively, relentlessly, and with just enough swagger to keep the rest of the industry guessing.
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