The Business Life of Kevin Hart: From Jokes to Generational Wealth
The Business Life of Kevin Hart: From Jokes to Generational Wealth
Entertainment - November 22, 2025
Inside the studio deals, tequila plays, venture bets, and hard lessons shaping entertainment’s busiest mogul.
Kevin Hart doesn’t move like a typical comedian. Most comics chase ticket sales and Netflix specials. Hart is raising private-equity rounds, shutting down a vegan fast-food experiment, launching a tequila with the family behind José Cuervo, and wiring venture money into AI and health-tech startups. The jokes made him famous. The strategy turned him into a founder.
The nucleus is HARTBEAT, the media company he built by merging HartBeat Productions and the Laugh Out Loud Network. In 2022, private-equity firm Abry Partners dropped $100 million into the business, valuing the combined company at around $650 million. That put Hart in a new category: the rare comedian who owns a mid-cap studio with global distribution.
HARTBEAT isn’t a vanity banner. It’s the engine behind Night School, which crossed $100 million worldwide, behind branded comedy projects with Netflix and NBCUniversal, and behind The Shop, the Emmy-nominated barbershop series that became its own cultural ecosystem. In 2023, the company rolled out more than twenty projects across film, TV, audio, and digital. It also weathered the same turbulence hitting every media company—layoffs, leadership changes, and streaming pressure. But despite the turbulence, reports say HARTBEAT remains profitable. That alone puts Hart among a tiny group of creators whose studios aren’t burning cash in the streaming downturn.
Then there’s the venture chapter.
HartBeat Ventures, backed by J.P. Morgan, invests in categories that align with Hart’s worldview: health, wellness, climate, AI, future-of-sports. The portfolio includes StatusPRO, the NFL-partnered VR sports-tech company; Neutral Foods, a climate-forward dairy brand backed by Breakthrough Energy; Function, a preventive-health platform; and Simple, an AI weight-loss app that raised a $35 million Series B with Hart’s fund involved. There’s also SweatPals, Bezel, Tally Health, and his own VitaHustle supplement line. It’s not celebrity investing for headlines—it’s a real cap table.
His consumer plays stretch even wider. Gran Coramino Tequila might be the cleanest. Hart partnered with Juan Domingo Beckmann, whose family runs José Cuervo, to build an ultra-premium tequila brand with real distribution and actual traction. It locked in a multi-year deal as the luxury tequila of the Philadelphia Eagles. And every bottle contributes a dollar to a LISC fund that’s already deployed more than a million dollars to Black and Latinx small-business owners in the U.S. and Mexico. It’s a lifestyle product with a funding flywheel attached.
But building an empire means eating your losses, too. Hart House, the plant-based fast-food chain he launched in Los Angeles, opened with real hype and a strong operator behind the menu. Two years later, every location shut down. Unit economics were brutal, the cost of plant-based ingredients kept climbing, and the novelty curve of vegan QSR dipped hard. Hart has said his worst investments came from betting on friends instead of fundamentals. Hart House is the visible version of that lesson.
The larger pattern is what matters. Hart’s empire isn’t a collection of celebrity endorsements. It’s a set of connected platforms: a profitable media studio, a venture fund placing disciplined early-stage bets, a fast-rising tequila brand, a supplement line, a few consumer experiments, and the occasional failure that proves he’s actually swinging.
He’s not pretending to be a CEO between tour dates. He is one.
And as the entertainment business keeps fracturing—studios collapsing, platforms tightening budgets—Kevin Hart’s playbook looks more like the future than the exception: build IP, own distribution, invest early, sell product, and treat comedy as the top-of-funnel for a real conglomerate.
This isn’t a comedian dabbling in business.
It’s a business ecosystem powered by comedy.
And it’s only getting bigger.
