We recently had the opportunity to talk with Cody Soodeen who is the co-founder and CEO of Kara Water, a local start up located right here in Stroudsburg, PA.
His company has received notable recognition over the years including the 2023 CES Best Innovation Award for the Kara Pure water cooler and Time Magazine named the Kara Pure one of the best inventions of 2022.
Cody, can you tell us a bit about Kara Water and what exactly your company does?
Kara Water created Kara Pure and Kara Pod which are devices that turn air into high quality drinking water. Our goal is to make drinking water accessible to everyone in the world through our innovative air-to-water technology.
How did you decide on the name Kara?
While I was attending college at the University of Hartford to study architecture, I learned about a beetle that can turn the air around it into drinking water using its shell and drink the water off of its own back to survive! This beetle also lives in one of the driest deserts in the world. This was the inspiration behind Kara Water. The name of that beetle is the Namibian Desert beetle, but its scientific name is Stenocara gracilipies a.k.a Kara, giving tribute to the beetle that inspired me to create Kara Water.
It is amazing concept to be able to create pure drinkable water from humidity. How does “air water” quality compare to that of bottled or tap?
What’s cool about our technology is that it actually distills the water that it captures, rendering it extremely pure. So pure that we reintroduce minerals back into the water after capturing it, producing 9.2pH alkaline mineral rich drinking water that is free of microplastics and ground water contaminants like pesticides, bacteria, and other things found in well and city water!
What was your experience like growing up in the Pocono Mountains and if it influenced the creation of Kara Water?
This is a great question because my experience growing up in the Poconos heavily influenced my decision to create Kara Water. My family lives in Reeder’s and we have well water. For many years, my parents had these persistent health issues but couldn’t identify the underlying cause. One day a doctor asked them if they could test our well water and low and behold, the results came back with extremely elevated levels of bacteria. We then found out that because we live downhill from the rest of the community, that all of the runoff from our uphill neighbors just emptied into our well, effectively making it impossible for us to shock it or treat it, so we were forced into purchasing and drinking only bottled water for many years! I didn’t expect that this would change the course of my life when I discovered the beetle, but this new knowledge sparked an interest in me to solve this problem and later found out that my family was far from the only ones who have experiences like this or worse!
Cody Soodeen and Gayatri Bhagwandeen are both Pocono locals
Cody Soodeen | CEO & Co-Founder
Gayatri Bhagwandeen | Sales Executive
During a cold Poconos winter, humidity levels indoors can drop quite a bit, are there humidity level requirements for homes and businesses to be able to use Kara Pure?
One of the fascinating properties of our technology is that it has an extremely wide range of operations. I’ll take it a step further and say that we have many customers in Arizona where humidity is always extremely low, and we consistently get calls from our customers saying, “I can’t believe how much water this thing pumps out in the desert!”
As a resident of the Poconos I performed much of my early days experiments and testing right here to determine its efficiency and how well it would perform. The units we have sprinkled around the Pocono’s work exceedingly well from our expectations, a true testament to our mission to make drinking water accessible to all, all of the time, everywhere.
When you were young, did you ever imagine that you would create such an incredible invention?
Never. I always say that I’ve been blessed with having goals and dreams. When I was 5, my friends and I lifted a piece of plywood onto a tree and called it a treehouse. I can specifically recall that at that moment I said to myself, “I want to be an architect when I grow up.” I then pursued that my entire life and eventually ended up becoming an architect, working on some of the biggest developments in the world, being sent to London for 4 years, working on major airports, and developments like Hudson Yards in NYC. But from the day that I learned about the beetle, my dreams grew, and I began to chase this idea of making a technology that could turn air into drinking water, and 12 years later, here we are! I honestly would never have thought that I would be in the drinking water business after dreaming of becoming an architect at the age of 5, becoming an architect, and then giving all of that up to pursue another dream of making drinking water from air!
As an inventor, I’m sure that you had your fair share of failures before your success. What words of encouragement would you give to young inventors?
Yes, 10 years of it to be exact. I’ll give you the same advice one of my best friends gave me when I nearly gave up at the last hour. I had told her that I could have had so many of the things I wanted if I’d just fully committed to architecture, I was good at it and firms sought me out to work for them, and that I was finally on my last leg for this venture after trying for 10 years to no avail. She said to me “Yeah, that’s true, you could have those things, but you’ll always regret for the rest of your life that you didn’t see this through” and no joke, two weeks later we launched a crowdfunding campaign, and it raised over $1.3M! My advice is that if you believe in what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter if its 1 month or 10 years like me, just don’t give up. Keep pursuing your vision, refining it, figuring out how to make it work, finding the right people to support your mission, and at some point, although you may not think you are ready, take the leap of faith, you may be surprised at the results.
Kara Pure seems like it would be a great solution for developing countries and areas that do not have access to drinkable water but do have access to electricity. Can you tell us about some of the more meaningful ways that you have seen Kara Pure used?
As our mission is to make drinking water accessible to everyone, developing countries is definitely part of our roadmap. A product that can be both on or off the grid is part of our product roadmap and we are planning to launch it in the future.
For the elderly, or other people that may struggle with lifting cases of water, Kara Pure is a great solution. Have people commented about how Kara Pure has changed their access to clean water?
We have found that we actually fall into the category of Age Tech! Think about it, there are a lot of people who are disabled or part of the aging population who may not have family nearby to assist them, and drinking water is one of the more difficult things to access unless it’s delivered to you by someone else. Kara Water’s technology can change that by making the water for them right in their home, giving them back their water independence! It’s super rewarding thinking about how powerful this is for the aging population and people with disabilities! Actually, the majority of our customer base are baby boomers, so we are already serving people in this capacity!
The initial cost of Kara Pure is offset by the savings that you can get from not needing to purchase bottled water, but is a lower price point, to make it even more accessible, possible in the future?
Yes, and we actually already announced our new product, Kara Pod, that will be self-refilling coffee device that by using our technology, it will self-fill its own water tank! Kara Pod will provide either 7 bottles of drinking water per day or 18 cups of coffee and will be priced at only $299! This new product gets us closer to making air-to-water technology accessible to more people in more places! You can find out more about Kara Pod at www.karapod.com
What are your future goals for the company and how you envision your products being used in the future?
In the next 10 years, we guarantee that you’ll see air-to-water technology like ours in every home and office as the next standard home appliance. With all of these new studies about microplastics being in literally everything we consume from water to meat to bread, we believe that right now, this will be the catalyst for rapid market adoption of air-to-water technology over the next 5-10 years.
If you would like to learn more about Kara Water and their mission you can visit their website at www.karawater.com.
If you are interested in investing in Kara Water, please visit: https://www.startengine.com/offering/karawater
Leave a Reply