Bevi, the market leader in smart water coolers, announced a $70 million Series D investment from Cowen Sustainable Investments (CSI), an environmental sustainability-focused growth investment platform. The $70 million in equity funding will support Bevi’s rapid growth and expansion into new verticals and products.
Artem Mariychin, managing director at CSI, will join the company’s board.
Key areas of investment include:
- New vertical expansion: Over the past two years, Bevi expanded from offices of tech and forward-thinking financial service companies to hotels, residential apartment buildings, car dealerships and health clubs. The company will make further investment to expand and diversify its footprint in commercial settings beyond the office.
- Product innovation: Today, Bevi offers two fully IoT-enabled coolers – its revolutionary Standup 2.0 and convenient Countertop product. Bevi’s world-class engineering team will continue rolling out new features to existing machines and designing new products to serve a wider array of customers.
- Scale manufacturing: Bevi is committed to ramping production of its machines to meet unprecedented demand.
- Partnership development: Bevi has leveraged various partnerships to help scale the business to reach over 4,000 commercial customers throughout North America. The company plans to further develop these partnerships while establishing new relationships to support its growth trajectory.
- Talent acquisition: Bevi is seeking to nearly double its headcount by hiring up to 100 people over the next 18 months, including sales, marketing, hardware, operations, and software.
“Bevi offers a unique value proposition to customers that is more sustainable, is cost-advantageous to incumbent bottles and cans, is easier to maintain and has demonstrated mass appeal,” co-head of CSI, Ewa Kozicz, said in the announcement. “It is no surprise that Bevi’s brand is unrivaled in the category.”
Sean Grundy, Bevi’s co-founder and CEO, added in the announcement, “Our purpose at Bevi is to transform beverages from one of the most wasteful industries on the planet to one of the most sustainable. We are driving the transition from an antiquated supply chain built around single-use plastic bottles to a network of smart machines that purify tap water and perfectly formulate beverages at the point of use. To realize our vision at scale, we need to build out groundbreaking infrastructure, optimize systems to manage this infrastructure and grow Bevi into a household name. Through the investment from Cowen Sustainable Investments we are now sufficiently capitalized to make this happen.”
In 2015, Bevi pioneered smart water coolers that provide filtered, flavored and sparkling water on demand. Bevi machines offer a more affordable and environmentally sustainable alternative to bottled water and flavored seltzer. Earlier this year, Bevi introduced its Standup 2.0, a next-generation water machine that offers over 40,000 permutations of beverages by letting users customize flavors, enhancements, carbonation levels and temperature.
“We are excited to partner with Bevi because of our strong mission alignment and the opportunity to leverage CSI’s data analytics expertise,” Vusal Najafov, co-head of CSI, added in the announcement. “Bevi has built an unparalleled database of beverage preferences at a highly localized level, and by investing in their data analytics capabilities, Bevi will be able to offer each customer a more personalized experience and create a truly innovative beverage brand.”
