A Hardware Park-based smart home device startup is working to restore people’s faith in their tap water.
The startup, Sipp, offers real-time monitoring of customers’ local water quality combined with advanced filtration methods.
Ben Bickerstaff, co-founder of the startup, calls its origin story serendipitous. While he was earning his master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering, Bickerstaff worked at the Office for Technology Transfer at the University of Alabama, which was responsible for intellectual property commercialization.
“Two professors walk in and they are starting to explore using ultraviolet light to treat water ... They end the meeting by saying, ‘If you have any students that are business savvy, but can understand the technology, we would love the help.’ So, my hand shoots up,” Bickerstaff said, adding that it was right up his alley as an environmental project.
He called that meeting “the impetus moment.” The professors became co-founders of Sipp, along with Bickerstaff, and the team worked to develop the underlying science of the project before moving on to the “product-ization” of the tech.
“I think the first challenge or thing that we had to learn was just because you’re making your product for a mass market, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna be easy to go to market,” Bickerstaff said, adding that, because everybody drinks water, it’s hard to find the initial go-to-market entry point.
After what Bickerstaff calls a few bad ideas and participation in Alabama Launchpad, the focus shifted to funding, which proved difficult. Sipp faced hurdles, including investors looking for more mature startups and supply chain issues during the Covid-19 pandemic. The team was using custom ultraviolet light bulbs for its technology, which became scarce during the pandemic because non-customized lamps to fight Covid-19 took priority.
Today, however, Bickerstaff said the team has saved enough money to self-invest in the product, which treats drinking water via both filtration and disinfection and collects water quality data.
The team is made up of five employees, and Bickerstaff said they are outsourcing what they cannot do themselves. He said a full-time operations and support person would be the next hire, along with a shipping and receiving manager, as a core part of the business model is an automated subscription. The next step for Sipp is beginning to raise funds early next year to support the first production run.
Ultimately, Sipp aims to build trust that a good place to get drinking water is from the tap — trust that Bickerstaff said has eroded away.
Sipp also wants to put emphasis on changing filters on a usage basis versus a time basis, since timer-based filters do not take household size and other factors into account.
The next step for Sipp is beginning to raise funds early next year to support the first production run.
