B2B News | Toronto’s Beachman Motor Company has picked up a strategic investment from Paul and Melissa Meehan, the entrepreneurs behind NÜTRL Vodka Soda – the ready-to-drink brand they scaled to the top of the Canadian market before selling it to Labatt Breweries of Canada (Anheuser-Busch InBev) in 2020. The investment comes through the couple’s Meehan Family Investments Inc. and lands as one of the more notable endorsements Beachman has picked up so far.
There’s history behind the deal that goes beyond a typical investor pitch. Paul Meehan has known Beachman co-founders Ben Taylor and Steve Payne for years – Paul once employed Ben, and heard the Beachman pitch in his office six years before the company sold its first bike. He also worked with Steve on music projects long before either had anything to do with motorcycles.
“I’ve been a fan of what Steve and Ben are building for a long time,” Meehan said, adding that watching the two of them build Beachman together felt like watching a genuine Canadian success story take shape.
Taylor, Beachman’s CEO and co-founder, framed the investment as something closer to a full-circle moment than a straightforward funding round, given that Meehan has effectively been around since before the company existed.
For context: NÜTRL wasn’t just a beverage launch: the Meehans built it from nothing into Canada’s leading vodka soda and one of the fastest-growing RTD brands in North America before the AB InBev exit. That’s the trajectory Beachman is explicitly chasing on two wheels: a homegrown Canadian brand that ends up mentioned in the same breath as Triumph, Vespa, and Royal Enfield.
On the product side, Beachman’s current lineup centers on the ’64, a mid-century-styled electric motorcycle leaning hard into 1960s California design cues. The company already sells in Canada and the US through an expanding dealer network, and recently became Canada’s first federally licensed electric motorcycle manufacturer in over 80 years: a regulatory milestone that’s been over 80 years in the making, literally. A second model, the Aviator, is in development on a fully custom platform and is pitched as faster and longer-range, part of a broader multi-product push aimed at putting Beachman in more direct competition with established global players.
The Meehan investment is part of a Series A round that has already closed its first tranche, with backing from a handful of founders behind other well-known Canadian consumer brands. Beachman says the funds will go toward strengthening its North American operations and funding an expansion into Europe – still the largest market in the world for premium motorcycles, and one where an EV-first Canadian brand will have to work to earn shelf space against entrenched legacy names.
