It doesn’t hurt that investors like Tim Cook and Wendy Schmidt, wife of Google billionaire Eric Schmidt, are throwing their support behind the conservation-minded Nebia design. The fancy device has been engineered to atomize water into millions of droplets with more surface area than your current average shower experience. This leads to a number of things: More water ends up on your body rather than bouncing off, more heat is transferred from the drops to you and the surroundings, and it covers more of you without your having to move or rotate.
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The catch is that the system will set you back $300 – 10 times the cost of a nice normal shower head.
The Nebia, instead, “blasts a steamy mist with the force of a miniaturized jet engine”, according to one review by a naked journalist.
Apple declined to comment, except to say Mr. Cook’s stake in the start-up was a personal investment. Carlos Gomez Andonaegui, Nebia’s cofounder and chairman, previously ran a sports club chain and multiple investment firms in Mexico City, a region that has suffered from severe water supply issues in recent years.
Equinox, Stanford University, Apple and Google have all installed Nebia prototypes in order to aid the development process. “It’s to help them find solutions to reduce their water consumption and for us to get user feedback on the shower”, Winter says. It is now raising (more) funds on Kickstarter (although it’s unclear how much it has already raised from backers such as Cook).
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Nebia had an original funding price of $100,000 which has then been surpassed and is now well over $130,000.
