Annie and David Lu with members of the H2Ok Innovations team at the Unilever Ben and Jerry's facility.In fall of 2021 and early 2022, Annie and David participated in theprogram, a virtual accelerator program run by Unilever in partnership with AB InBev, the Coca Cola Co. and Colgate-Palmolive.
As part of this partnership, Unilever tested the H2Ok Innovations solution at its Ben & Jerry's facility in Waterbury, Vermont. For investors, H2Ok's value proposition is especially timely, as more manufacturing is coming back to the United States, and those facilities face increasingly strict efficiency standards.
"We invested because they are incredible founders. Annie and David are relentless and incredibly smart, and this is the culture they have built out at H2Ok. They are the right and rare mixture of customer- and problem-oriented, and they have executed well to build a defensible technical solution that fits the customers' needs," Dayna Grayson from Construct Capital told CNBC.
That trust is invaluable because running a business with employees, partners and customers can get stressful.