The Enhanced Games isn’t just about sports — it’s a $31 million product demo

When the starting gun fires in Las Vegas this month, the Enhanced Games will officially launch its challenge against legacy athletic competitions. Behind the sporting spectacle lies a high-stakes product demo for Enhanced Group’s longevity drug business.

On May 24, more than 40 athletes — nearly all of them openly taking performance-enhancing drugs and supplements — will dive into pools, bolt across the track, and lift barbells. Over the past two years, the company behind the provocative event raised money from the likes of Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. to deliver “a world-class sporting event.”

But the business is no longer about the event itself. 

The broadcasting rights were given away for free and the 2,500 people who will attend were invited at no cost. The games are only expected to generate revenue from sponsorships, at least for this year.

Now, the plan is for the games to serve as a marketing push for Enhanced’s consumer health business, with a goal of hitting 60,000 subscribers by the end of the year. Enhanced made its first $2,755 in revenue during the first quarter, which reflects early online sales of its newly launched supplements marketplace. 

The ultimate gamble is simple: Enhanced hopes millions of people will watch athletes shatter world records using unapproved, biohacked treatments and immediately want to buy some for themselves.

“The last few years have really been shaping who we are,” Maximilian Martin, CEO of Enhanced, said in an interview. “Now we’re finally at a point where we feel very comfortable in our ability to deliver on both sides of the business and take use of those synergies that flourish between them.”

The $31 million event

Running such an event has proved to be a costly and potentially risky project. About a week before the event, Martin said they were ahead of schedule and under budget.

Enhanced expects to spend up to $16 million in prizes for athletes, of which $10 million is reserved for those who break world records. (A few records have already been broken in training, Martin said.) About $6.6 million is going toward a 50-meter portable pool, and another nearly $2 million toward a portable six-lane track system.

Enhanced said in a regulatory filing that it has not been able to obtain insurance to cover potential claims from athletes in the case of injury or death, but is mitigating this “uninsurable risk” by closely monitoring the athletes’ health going into the games.

It spends another $625,000 a month on stipends for the more than 40 athletes it has under contract. Enhanced even dropped a staggering $100,000 per athlete on healthcare over the last four months — a sum Martin acknowledges is “unheard of, and actually quite over the top.”

“But it’s so important to us, and we believe there’s so much IP in the work that we do with the athletes, so we’re going to be able to monetize them,” Martin said.

The athletes are also part of the product. Most of them are part of a clinical research study approved by the Abu Dhabi Department of Health. It is designed to generate a proprietary dataset on the safety and tolerability of performance-enhancing substances, which is a “durable competitive advantage,” Enhanced said in regulatory filings.

In a letter to shareholders, Martin compared the business to Formula 1, where high-end engineering for elite racing “trickles down” to commercial road cars. Martin says the protocols developed for elite athletes are the core intellectual property that will be scaled into Enhanced’s consumer health platform. While dosage protocols for existing compounds aren’t patentable like a new pharmaceutical, the proprietary data could give Enhanced an edge when prescribing under-studied treatments.

“So what really is the key ingredient, the magic sauce, is the IP on how to prescribe to certain individuals that have certain objectives,” Martin said.

A peptide play

This comes at a time when consumers are increasingly interested in peptides, injectable supplements associated with the biohacking tech elite. The Food and Drug Administration is poised to ease restrictions on peptides later this year.

The median peptide user spends between $500 and $999 a month on the supplements, with some people spending upward of $1,000, a survey from Peptime found. As of now, consumers are bypassing the FDA by buying vials of peptides labeled “for research use only,” but once restrictions are lifted, it will open the door for companies like Enhanced to cash in. 

Before Enhanced went public, investors looking to ride the peptide wave had only one real option on the stock market: telehealth giant Hims & Hers, which has telegraphed getting into the peptide business, though executives said this month that it would likely ease into the category. 

Selling drugs online is a high-margin business that’s relatively simple to get going. Enhanced followed the same playbook many before it have: link up with a doctor network and some compounding pharmacies, and focus on building a brand. 

It’s not uncommon for telehealth companies to spend big on marketing. Hims, the largest in its category, spent $919.2 million on marketing in 2025. But unlike Hims, Enhanced is banking on one big unproven marketing strategy to spark its growth.

The stock has a single analyst rating from Lucid Capital Markets, which rates the company a “buy” and has a price target of $15, citing booming demand for longevity treatments among the rising “mass affluent” class. Enhanced’s losses will shrink after the inaugural event, Lucid analyst Alex Fuhrman wrote in a May 10 note. 

“Love it or hate it, the Games and the marketing content that come out of them will likely be far more memorable than the standard fare of before-and-after weight loss photos and stock footage of happy grandparents playing with toddlers,” Fuhrman said.

Running out of juice

The economic reality behind this transhumanist ambition is stark. 

Enhanced burned $16.4 million in the first quarter of this year as it readied for the Enhanced Games. It has also given a “going concern” warning, an accounting term that signals the company has reason to believe it may not be able to cover its costs within the next year. 

“We have not built a sporting event that needs to break even in year 1,” Martin said. 

The company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on May 8 through a merger with a blank-check company A Paradise Acquisition Corp. 

In these types of deals, investors in the shell company, known as a SPAC, get a choice: stay on for the ride, or claw their money back. In the case of Enhanced Group, the vast majority of the SPAC’s investors chose the latter option. Of the over $200 million the SPAC raised in its IPO, $3 million was left after the merger. 

Redemption rates in SPACs have spiked in recent years, according to data compiled by Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida who studies companies going public. It’s also not uncommon for them to go public with going concern notices.

“If the company is losing money and raises little money in the merger with a SPAC, the outlook is bleak,” Ritter said.

Enhanced jumped 20% on the day it began trading on the NYSE, and has now fallen by more than 52% from when it started trading under its own ticker on the NYSE. On average, companies that went public via a SPAC from 2021 through 2025 found their share prices down by about 60% a year later. 

“But since public investors typically hold very few shares, the main losers are the pre-merger shareholders of the operating company,” Ritter said.

It’s also unclear if any of the early investors stayed on after Enhanced’s business model changed or its SPAC merger. Several of them, including Thiel, did not respond to requests for comment. 

Enhanced took out a $20 million credit line from Apeiron — an investment firm run by Christian Angermayer, cofounder of Enhanced — earlier this year. Angermayer, one of the original seed investors, now holds majority voting power in Enhanced. 

Angermayer said in a post on X that he has invested more than $10 million in Enhanced throughout funding rounds and said he currently has no intention of selling shares “ever.”

“May 24 marks the beginning of the real proof,” he said.