“When Nebia woos investors, it invites them to take a shower,” Brian X. Chen reports for The New York Times. “The strangely intimate sales pitch has proven effective. The six-person start-up in San Francisco, which has developed a water-conserving shower head, already has received funding from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. Its first investors, most of whom have showered with the product, include Timothy D. Cook, the chief executive of Apple. In addition, Nebia has received funding from Michael Birch, a founder of the members-only club the Battery, and from the Schmidt Family Foundation, which was co-founded by Eric Schmidt, chairman of [Alphabet Inc., formerly Google].”
“Nebia said its shower head, which looks like a circular street lamp hanging from the base of an aluminum iMac, reduced water consumption by as much as 70 percent,” Chen reports. “The product uses nozzles to break water up into tiny droplets, which increases the surface area of where the spray can go. While the average shower takes 20 gallons of water, Nebia said its product used six gallons.”
“Apple declined to comment, except to say Mr. Cook’s stake in the start-up was a personal investment. Nebia declined to say how much money it had raised,” Chen reports. “Since October, Nebia has tested prototypes of the shower head inside locker rooms in some Equinox gyms and on the campuses of Apple, Google and Stanford University.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sounds like a recipe for a clogfest from calcium and other mineral deposits found in many water sources.
We can see why the environmentalist Cook would invest and install these on the Apple campus (California is in the midst of a crippling drought), but it’s funny that Eric T. Mole has invested in a shower head when no matter how many showers he takes, he’ll never be clean.