Edible water bottle Ooho receives a flood of crowdfunding support

by Startacus Admin

Water. It’s wet, runny, and vital to life. It’s also notoriously difficult to make portable without environmentally-unfriendly packaging. There are plenty of reasons to dislike plastic bottles: In the US (because the numbers are more dramatic!), people go through roughly 1500 bottles per second; 80% of these, which is around $1,000,000,000 worth of plastic, end up in landfills to sit for up to 1000 years; 17 million barrels of oil are used every year just to create enough plastic bottles for Americans; chemicals!

Skipping Rocks Lab wants to turn things around with Ooho: a new kind of water container they have been developing over the past 2 years, made from Chloride and algae extract. Ooho is compostable, but it’s quicker and more convenient just to eat it. Apparently, with no taste, it’s barely noticeable alongside the water itself.

Skipping Rocks Lab is a part of the Climate KIC startup accelerator, and is based in Imperial College London. Ooho is just the beginning - their aim is “to stop 1 billion plastic bottles reaching the ocean every year & to stop 300 million kg of CO2 from ever being emitted”, producing waste-free alternatives to all sorts of packaging and beyond. After all, everything gets thrown out eventually, so why not ensure it won’t damage the environment when it does?

Last week, Skipping Rocks Lab was featured in a short Now This Future video showing the water blob and a little information about it. Overnight, the video had 12 million views - today, it has had 84 million plus views. In just 3 days, the startup finished its seed funding round with 1000 investors and £850,000, which included a quickly-exceeded crowdfunding target, at 199%! People clearly want to see Ooho take off, and with Skipping Rocks Lab targeting events like Glastonbury and the London Marathon, the world might soon be introduced to a new kind of water ‘bottle’.

Watch their crowdcube pitch video below that gives you a good flavour / taste of Ooho ;)

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• #ooho
• #skipping rocks lab
• #climate kic startup accelerator
• #imperial college london
• #now this
• #crowdfunding
• #packaging
• #environment

Published on: 18th April 2017