MEDASE Cocktails, A Black Women-Owned Brand Founded By Lifelong Friends, Receives Strategic Investment – AfroTech
Monica Cornitcher is keeping her late friend’s legacy alive through their cocktail brand, lighting up the market.
Inga Dyer was Cornitcher’s close friend for more than 30 years. The pair met while attending Howard University in the 1990s, where they also pledged Delta Sigma Theta. In their respective careers, Dyer became an entertainment lawyer, and Cornitcher built expertise in mergers and acquisitions and business transformation while leading her own company for nearly 25 years. At the time, they did not realize their skills would eventually lead them to start a business together, though Cornitcher felt entrepreneurship was always her path and never worked in corporate again after turning 28.
The progression of their entrepreneurship journey together was planted during the wake of COVID-19, Cornitcher shared in an interview with AFROTECH™. She had been in Atlanta but moved to California to be closer to family, and Dyer already lived in California. By default, the pair was hanging out more frequently, whether that be taking walks or meeting for drinks.
“Then we started to talk about, ‘Hey, it would be nice to have a cocktail, right?’ Because we did drink cocktails throughout college, after college, but we were kind of slowing down on drinking. And Inga’s reason for not drinking was that she was battling breast cancer at the time,” Cornitcher told AFROTECH™. “And during her battle with breast cancer, she was not drinking at all. And we were starting to experiment with mocktails in the space. We probably tasted everything out there at the time.”
In 2023, the pair self-invested in the vision and formally launched MEDASE Cocktails, a premium, organic, zero-proof cocktail venture. The name of the business comes from the word, “Medaase,” which means “thank you” in the Asante Twi language of Ghana. With the help of a Black female chemist, the brand launched with two flavors: Hello Sunshine Margarita and Goodnight Moon Moscow Mule.
“I say it all the time, this was friendship in a glass… And I’m continuing it on for all the other people that I’ve met who don’t drink for whatever reason it may be, and supporting them with cocktails that really taste authentic, so they’re not losing anything but the hangover,” Cornitcher explained.
A year into MEDASE Cocktails’ creation, Dyer passed away from cancer. Cornitcher temporarily halted the venture and began contemplating the road ahead for their newly launched venture.
“Do I keep moving on? There was also a lot of emotional things that I was going through around the death of a friend,” Cornitcher recalled to AFROTECH™. “Inga wasn’t the first person who passed in my life of cancer. Both of my parents passed of cancer, my brother passed of cancer… I had to sit with myself for a couple of months to figure out what am I gonna do? Am I gonna keep moving forward? And towards the end of the year, I said, ‘You know what? Let me pick myself up, brush myself off, and let me restart again.’”
The brand relaunched in June 2025 with a full lineup, including four new flavors, a shared goal previously discussed with Dyer and detailed in a 60-page document.
“We had a very, very detailed end-to-end business plan… So it was not a surprise to me that our next flavors [were] gonna be a Jamaican Rum Punch, Lemon Drop, Old Fashioned,” Cornitcher said.
Recently, MEDASE Cocktails received a strategic investment that will be used for distribution, operations, and marketing, which will unlock access to capital to support more than $20 million in annual sales before it can trigger its next investment, according to information shared with AFROTECH™. The founder also noted the investment helped to lower the cost of the brand’s offerings to remain competitive.
“I was able to operationalize the business from the standpoint of putting systems in place to manage inventory systems and be able to support my purchasing process or vendor process,” she said.
The investment is timely for the brand, which sells on Amazon, the TikTok shop, and its own website. It is also available at the Harbor View Hotel in Martha’s Vineyard, MA, and at 32 local retail stores. The brand additionally partners with Farm Fresh To You, a subscription-based retail platform, according to information shared with AFROTECH™. Cornitcher is currently in negotiations with two additional regional retailers and two national retailers as well.
“We’re really excited about where the brand is about to go,” she expressed.
Top markets include Chicago; Atlanta; the Washington, DC, DMV area; and Texas, which will inform desired placements for expansion into regional stores. The brand primarily attracts people ages 32 to 51, she noted. However, it is also leaning into younger audiences following its appearance at Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival as the official non-alcoholic sponsor in 2025. At the Vineyard lounge, many youth informed Cornitcher that the brand needed to be on the TikTok shop, so it was added as another sales channel within the past year, she shared.
MEDASE will also reach younger consumers through a student ambassador program that will host brand pop-ups at several universities. The program is being piloted through June, with an official launch planned for fall 2026.
