Yesterday, I got the chance to cap off my series on the Mass Challenge winners with an interview David Perry, $100K Mass Challenge Prize winner and founder of Osmopure. Osmopure has developed a bottle top filtration cartidge that screws into used soda bottles filled with dirty water, and turns them into simple and effective water filtration systems.
Bostinno: What problem did Osmopure set out to solve?
David Perry: We were looking to address the global water crisis. Right now there are around 1.1 billion people all across the world that do not have access to safe drinking water. As a result of that 3.5 million people a year die from water-born illnesses. We’re not talking about water that just tastes kind of funny; this is water that has dangerous micro- organisms that cause very serious diarrheal diseases. These diseases will then lead to dehydration and death.
Bostinno: Can you tell our readers the story of how the company was founded?
David Perry: It actually started about a year and a half ago when I was finishing up my degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in my capstone class called “Inventors Studio.” The idea of the class was to find a problem, and engineer a solution to it. The class really had an entrepreneurial twist to it; a lot of the driving force behind it was coming up with a good idea and bringing it to market. At the end of the class there were only three of us who really wanted to do something more than take it as a good lesson. I actually wasn’t even working on the water project at that point. Two others in the class were working on the global water crisis, while my project concerned mercury pollution.
We looked at joining forces to give this the best shot it can get, so we decided to focus on the global water crisis starting from scratch. We worked for a while to figure out how to drive the cost as low as possible, while making this as easy to manufacture and deliver as possible. So we started looking at what parts of the device can we get around making; what can we eliminate from the manufacturing process? We saw that we didn’t really need to create a manufacturing piece that held water, because they were all over the world in the form of these plastic soda bottles. So we decided to piggy back on Coca-Cola’s success and use these soda bottles on what we needed to manufacture and distribute.
Bostinno: What do you think the reaction of your product release is going to be from larger companies like Brita? Do they share the same philosophy as Osmopure?
David Perry: The popular notion that we have in the United States is very different than what we are doing with Osmopure. Your Brita filters, and other filters like that are meant to take water that is already safe and make it taste a little bit better. If you try to run pond water through a Brita filter, however, and drink what comes out the other side…you’re going to end up with some pretty severe diarrhea. What we’re aimed at is quite a bit separate from what Brita is aimed at.
Our main purpose isn’t to reduce waste through reuse of plastic soda bottles. The reduction of waste is kind of a happy side-effect; our main focus is reduce human suffering that results on people not being able to get their hands on clean drinking water. We’re aiming to create a product that is simple enough, and inexpensive enough to be applied in countries all over the world, while at the same time maintaining a consumer appeal in the United States.
Bostinno: So does Osmopure primarily take on a worldly view?
David Perry: The aim is to create a product that is simple enough and inexpensive enough in countries all over the world, but at the same time maintaining a consumer appeal in the United States for backpacking, hiking, outdoor recreation and also emergency preparedness both on the home level, and the government level: FIMA, Red Cross getting ready for a flood or other natural disaster. That way at some point down the road we can use profitable sales in the United States to subsidize the cost of getting these to people who need them but don’t really have the resources to obtain them.
Bostinno: Can you tell us about your experience with Mass Challenge?
David Perry: They say it’s not about what you know; it’s about who you know. Mass Challenge has definitely solidified that lesson for me. I’ve only been out of school for a year and a half, and I’ve experienced quite a bit in that year in a half, but it’s nothing really in comparison to the experience you really need to get a product up and off the ground. Drawing on the experience of others has been widely productive for getting this stuff off the ground, and that’s really what Mass Challenge has been all about. For a young startup to try to get any kind of face time with people who have the experience in law, or in business that you need can be very difficult. You have to hunt them down, track them down, and find all sorts of ways to stalk them on the Internet. But being part of Mass Challenge, you’re bringing all these new startups together, and all of the sudden all these important resources you need are coming after you! Mass Challenge gave us access to so many different resources that we otherwise wouldn’t have gotten on our own.
