KSI Co-Founded a $1.2 Billion Drink Brand With His Old Rival. Its Australian Arm Just Ran Out of Cash.

Olajide “JJ” Olatunji — KSI — spent over a decade turning a FIFA commentary channel into one of YouTube’s biggest. In January 2022 he and the man he’d twice fought in a boxing ring, Logan Paul, turned their rivalry into a drinks company, Prime Hydration, that Bloomberg reported was on pace to clear $1.2 billion in sales within two years of launch. Three and a half years later, Prime’s Australian distributor filed for administration with $85,000 in the bank, and a US judge ordered the brand to hand over both founders’ phones. Both halves happened to the same company, and both are checkable.

From a bedroom in Watford to 1 million subscribers

KSI registered his first YouTube channel as a teenager in 2008 and launched the one he still runs, KSIOlajidebt, on July 24, 2009, uploading FIFA commentary from his parents’ house in Watford, according to Wikipedia’s sourced account of his career. The channel passed 1 million subscribers by 2012. He’s said he was clearing around £1,500 a month from YouTube by his teens — more than his teacher’s salary — which is why he dropped out of sixth form to make videos full time. He joined the YouTube collective the Sidemen in October 2013 and stayed 13 years, building a parallel music career and, in 2018 and 2019, a boxing career against fellow YouTuber Logan Paul: a majority draw in their first fight on August 25, 2018, and a split-decision win for KSI in the professional rematch on November 9, 2019. As of Wikipedia’s sourced count in April 2026, his main channel had 18.5 million subscribers, his music channel 24.8 million, and his four active channels combined 47.49 million.

The rivalry became a business, and the business became huge

On January 4, 2022, KSI and Paul announced Prime Hydration — a sports drink sold through Congo Brands, the company co-owned by American businessmen Max Clemons and Trey Steiger that also distributes the pair’s Prime Energy line. Bloomberg’s Kim Bhasin reported on November 8, 2023 that Prime had done $250 million in sales in its first year and was set to surpass $1.2 billion in 2023, a number that made it one of the fastest-scaling beverage brands anyone could point to. It sold out at retailers, drew resale lines, and briefly made its founders mainstream business-press subjects rather than just YouTube names.

Then the numbers went the other way

The reversal is now sitting in public filings on two continents. In the UK, Prime Hydration’s own accounts — reported by Grocery Gazette on June 23, 2025 — showed revenue falling from £112.2 million in 2023 to £32.8 million in 2024, with pre-tax profit dropping from £4.3 million to under £1 million and net profit down 91.6% to £312,000. The company’s own language, per that filing, was that it was “entering a strategic review process to transition from an initial hyper growth phase to a more sustainable, long-term presence in the market.”

In Australia, it went further. IBTimes Australia reported on October 7, 2026 that Congo Brands Australia — the Melbourne-based distributor behind the local Prime business — entered administration on July 7, 2026, with administrator Alice Fay Ruhe of The Ruhe Group appointed over A$7.92 million in debt against just A$84,855 in cash. The same filings showed the distributor’s sales falling from A$31 million in 2023 to A$14.5 million in 2024 — a 53% drop — with a A$1.42 million net loss. IBTimes Australia’s reporting on the ownership structure put Congo Brands at roughly 60% and KSI and Paul at roughly 20% each; neither founder is reported to hold direct equity in the Australian distributor itself. Globally, Forbes-reported figures cited in IBTimes UK’s September 16, 2026 report put Prime’s 2025 revenue at around $300 million — roughly a 76% fall from its reported 2023 peak.

A stack of lawsuits that predates the crash

The sales decline isn’t Prime’s only public paper trail. A consumer sued Prime Hydration LLC in the Northern District of California in August 2023, alleging its grape-flavor drink contained PFAS (“forever chemicals”); a separate suit filed in the Southern District of New York in April 2024 alleged Prime’s energy drinks carried 215–225mg of caffeine against an advertised 200mg, and in March 2025, per Bloomberg Law’s reporting, a court let consumers revise a related claim that the caffeine marketing targeted children. NBC News reported on July 19, 2024 that the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee sued Prime over a Kevin Durant-branded bottle that used phrases like “TEAM USA” and “GOING FOR GOLD,” which it said falsely implied an Olympic sponsorship that belongs exclusively to Coca-Cola. Separately, bottler Refresco sued Prime in Delaware’s Chancery Court in August 2024 for roughly $67.7 million, alleging Prime failed to order the minimum 18.5 million cases a year its three-year supply contract required. Most recently, Law360 reported on July 13, 2026 that a federal magistrate judge in Kentucky ordered Prime Hydration to search Paul’s and KSI’s personal devices as part of discovery in a still-pending false-advertising suit, citing the pair’s own public, vocal ties to the brand as the reason their phones were in scope. We opened that report directly; we did not find a second outlet covering the same order independently, so treat that specific detail as Law360’s reporting alone rather than separately confirmed.

What the two founders are saying and doing about it

Paul addressed the decline directly on the PBD Podcast on September 15, 2026, saying — per IBTimes UK’s report the next day — that not selling part of Prime to a private-equity buyer when offers around $500 million were on the table was a “massive, massive, massive mistake,” calling it at least a $100 million missed opportunity. KSI, for his part, announced on May 31, 2026 that he was leaving the Sidemen after 13 years, telling fans in his departure video that he’d been “running at full speed, at 100mph” between Prime, a stint as a Britain’s Got Talent judge, an ownership stake in English football club Dagenham & Redbridge, and his music career, and that “nothing bad has happened” between him and the group — a reporting detail corroborated by Tubefilter, NME, and ITV News within days of the announcement.

What our checker would add — and why we didn’t run it

KSI’s channel is on YouTube, one of the two platforms — alongside Twitch — that our free authenticity checker scores with live data rather than a modeled estimate. We didn’t run that check for this piece, and nothing here states or implies a numeric authenticity score for his account. A 17-year channel history, YouTube’s own subscriber counts, and company filings from two different countries don’t need a synthetic score layered on top to establish the account and the business behind it are real. If you want a live read anyway, you can run it yourself at /check/youtube/ksi.

The bottom line

KSI’s YouTube career and his drink company are two different kinds of success story, and right now they’re pointed in different directions: the channel keeps growing on numbers YouTube itself reports, while the company he built with a former ring rival is losing money in public filings on two continents and had a judge order both founders’ phones searched in a lawsuit neither has resolved. Reporting the brand’s $1.2 billion peak without its 2026 filings, or the filings without the peak, would each tell only half of a story that’s checkable either way.

Sources: Wikipedia, “KSI”; Wikipedia, “Prime (drink)”; Bloomberg, “Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime Drinks Are Set to Surpass $1.2 Billion in Sales” (Kim Bhasin, November 8, 2023); Grocery Gazette, “Prime Hydration profits slump as strategic review launched” (June 23, 2025); IBTimes Australia, “Prime Drink’s Australian Company Collapses Into Administration, Owing Millions With Just $85,000 Left” (October 7, 2026); IBTimes UK, “Logan Paul Admits ‘Massive, Massive, Massive’ $100M Mistake as Prime Drink Empire Collapses After $1BN Peak” (Marty Vergel Baes, September 16, 2026); NBC News, “U.S. Olympic Committee hits Logan Paul’s drink brand with trademark infringement suit” (July 19, 2024); Bloomberg Law, “Logan Paul’s Prime Sports Drink Sued by Bottler for $68 Million”; Bloomberg Law, “Prime Hydration Consumers Get Approval to Revise Marketing Suit”; Law360, “Prime Energy Must Search Logan Paul’s Devices In Ad Suit” (July 13, 2026); Tubefilter, “KSI’s 13-year run as a member of the Sidemen has come to an end” (June 1, 2026); ITV News, “‘Hardest video I’ve ever had to make’: KSI announces sudden Sidemen departure” (May 31, 2026).