Smarter Water

At first glance, you might think Bevi is a seltzer company. But you’d be wrong.

“At our core, we’re an environmental company,” says co-founder Sean Grundy, MBA ’13.
“Our mission is to destroy the bottled beverage supply chain.”

With machines that dispense still, sparkling, or flavored water, Bevi has made significant inroads into the office beverage market since its founding in 2013 and is expanding throughout the United States and Canada. By making its dispensers “unbelievably easy to use,” the company has helped businesses eliminate thousands of bottles and cans—as many as 35,000 annually per machine. And the impact extends beyond physical waste reduction, says Grundy. “Bottled beverages require a huge amount of fuel for transport. About a third of their carbon footprint is transportation.” An added bonus: Bevi’s machines save time for office managers, who had been spending hours ordering and stocking soda and seltzer.

While Grundy and his co-founders, Frank Lee, MBA ’13 and Eliza Becton, who has an industrial design degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, came together with an environmental goal, coursework at MIT Sloan helped make Bevi a reality. “I showed up to Sloan with almost no practical skills,” says Grundy, who signed up for “every hard finance course” he could find. He also embraced classes in entrepreneurial product development and marketing. “To actually come up with a product and a business plan, we had to do so much thoughtful research and so many user interviews,” he says. It was through this research that the team identified the opportunity in the office market. “A lot of people felt guilty about the waste they were generating, but they didn’t have a great alternative,” says Grundy.

After many rounds of prototypes, now they do.  An idea made to matter.