Rosa Li: The Investor Who Canned Her Grandmother’s Tonics

Rosa Li’s company began in a kitchen in Beijing, a long time before it had a name. “Growing up, my grandmother brewed tonics with wild herbs, rare spices, and medicinal plants,” she told The Story Exchange. “Health-wise, they worked wonders, from boosting my immunity to calming my stress. But taste-wise, they were hard to swallow.” That last sentence is, more or less, the business plan. wildwonder, the sparkling drink she founded in San Francisco in 2020, is her attempt to keep the grandmother and lose the bitterness: a can with fiber and a probiotic in it that tastes like guava and rose, or cherry lemonade, or, since August, apple and yuzu. Along the way it went on Shark Tank, into every Whole Foods in the country, and onto the Inc. 5000 list of fast-growing private companies twice.

The grandmotherBeijing, Indiana, and a philosophy

“I spent the first 12 years of my life in Beijing with my grandparents,” Li told Cut Fruit Collective in 2022. “So I actually didn’t know my parents very well as a child. My parents came to Indiana for grad school.” She followed them at 12, and arrived knowing almost nothing of her new country: “I didn’t even know any English outside of the alphabet.” What she brought with her was an outlook. “My grandmother really instilled in me the philosophy of food as medicine from a very early age,” she said.

Ask Li who her role model is and she does not name a founder. Her grandmother, she says, “didn’t get to go to school but her curiosity led her to educate and teach herself how to read and write. She ended up taking various leadership roles after she raised her four children, and even started learning English at the age of 65!” It is a lovely detail, and a useful key to the company. The brand’s entire visual identity is bright, a little playful and unmistakably modern, but the thing it keeps returning to, in almost every interview and product launch, is a woman in Beijing brewing tonics for a granddaughter. “My grandmother’s herbal wisdom is the foundation of everything we do at wildwonder,” Li said in May.

The detourFinance, and what it cost

The route from that kitchen to a beverage company ran through Wall Street. Li graduated from Northwestern in 2007, worked in investment banking, then became a private equity and venture investor at Warburg Pincus, and earned an MBA at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, according to her Gold House profile. She is not a nutritionist or a clinician, and has never presented herself as one. “I never really thought of myself as a beverage entrepreneur,” she told The Quality Edit. “In fact I started my career in finance, worked a lot of stressful jobs, traveled a lot, and all those hours eventually started to have an impact on my body.”

The impact landed in her gut. “To heal, I turned back to the ancient Chinese herbs and botanicals I grew up with,” she told Beverage Industry last year. “My grandmother used to brew traditional healing tonics for me in China, where I was raised until I was 12, and those recipes became my inspiration.” Before the drink there was a tea company, an artisanal loose-leaf business called Rosali Tea that she ran from 2015 to 2017. Then came the idea of something cold and carbonated that people would actually reach for. The early version was bottled in glass and called Tea Crush. “Right now what you’re seeing on the website is, gosh, like 10 iterations after the first product we launched,” she said in 2022. “Its name has changed. It was in a glass bottle.”

The launchTwo weeks before the world shut down

The rebrand to wildwonder went out, as Li puts it, “two weeks before the Pandemic,” with a launch into Northern California Whole Foods stores in March 2020. The timing was about as bad as timing gets. “Especially during COVID, our business basically got wiped out in the beginning,” she said. “We were very much focused on offices and food service initially and had to switch to retail and online.” The US Chamber of Commerce’s CO has reported some of the scrappier details of the years that followed: a home carbonation rig she built from a beer keg with an engineer friend, and more than 100 San Francisco grocery stores visited in three months to get the drink on shelves. In 2021 the glass bottles became cans.

Then came the visibility. In January 2023 Li pitched on Shark Tank and left with a $500,000 deal from that episode’s guest shark, DoorDash chief executive Tony Xu. In January 2025 the drink went into Whole Foods Market nationwide, and when the grocer published its food trend forecast for 2026, wildwonder’s Cherry Lemonade was one of the products it named, under a trend it called “Sweet, But Make It Mindful.” The company placed No. 109 on the 2025 Inc. 5000, its second year on the list. Through all of it, the flavors kept her roots in view. The newest, Apple Yuzu, launched in August with shiso leaf, which Li calls “a botanical I grew up with.” And the moment she describes as the most meaningful is not a retail deal. “That was the moment where my grandma tasted my product for the first time,” she said, “so it was a really special moment.”

The canWhat is actually in it

Every flavor on wildwonder’s own nutrition panels reads the same: a 12-ounce can, 40 calories, 5 grams of fiber and 6 grams of sugar. The fiber comes from Jerusalem artichoke and chicory root, both sources of inulin; the new Apple Yuzu swaps in cassava root fiber alongside Jerusalem artichoke inulin. The probiotic is one billion units of Bacillus subtilis DE111, a spore-forming strain chosen partly because spores hold up better in a drink than most bacteria do. The sweetness comes from fruit juice, agave and monk fruit, and Target’s listing for the Strawberry Passion can puts added sugar at 5 grams. That is a small fraction of a regular soda, and still worth knowing if you are counting.

No one has studied the drink itself, and the company does not claim otherwise in any published paper. The research on its ingredients is real but modest, and worth reading at its actual size. A 2010 randomized trial gave 66 adults drinks containing 5 grams a day of Jerusalem artichoke inulin, the same amount of fiber as a can, and found their bifidobacteria, a group of gut bacteria generally considered beneficial, rose compared with placebo, with a slight increase in gas. For DE111, a small study of 11 people showed the spores survive the stomach and germinate in the small intestine. A 2021 pilot trial of the strain at the same one-billion dose found some shifts in immune cells, but digestive symptoms, gut bacteria and markers of inflammation were “largely unaffected.” Both DE111 studies were funded by or run by the company that makes the strain. Our read: a can of wildwonder is a lower-sugar soda with a meaningful dose of fiber in it, which is a genuinely good thing to put in a lot of people’s hands. It is a drink, not a treatment, and people who are sensitive to inulin, including many with IBS, may notice it. For more on the category, see our guide to prebiotic sodas.

The herbs are the part of the can closest to Li’s heart, and we would describe them the way she does: as flavors from the tradition she grew up in. Hibiscus, honeysuckle, violet and shiso make the drinks taste like themselves. Whether they do anything more at the amounts found in a soda has not been tested, and the fun of the product does not depend on it.

The disclosure mapWhere her interests sit

Li is the founder and chief executive of wildwonder and profits from its sales. The company is privately held and independent, and the growth figures in this piece come from the Inc. 5000 ranking and the company’s own releases. Its product pages use some wellness language that goes further than the evidence does, which is common in the category and which we have not repeated here. She is a founder and former investor, not a clinician, and her account of her own gut is her experience, not advice; anyone with ongoing digestive symptoms should start with their own doctor. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with wildwonder and was not sent product. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from the company.