Startup Spotlight: PÜL

Startup Spotlight is an interview series where we ask health, fitness, and wellness startups that use Terra to share their wisdom from their journey to success and where they see fitness data going in the future.

In this spotlight, we connected with Jock Thompson and Miles Bowles, co-founders of PÜL. This California-based company is revolutionizing the way people think about hydration.

What is PÜL?

Jock: First of all, I love how you say PÜL ('py-ul') - one of our partners is actually from Norway, so it's cool to hear that Scandinavians have a similar way of saying it, haha. (correct pronunciation - ‘pool').

The essence of what we are doing at PÜL is tracking, integrating, and training hydration. We have an app that integrates with a water bottle smart cap that tracks your hydration status in real time. Our primary mission is to improve human performance, and we do that by modifying human behavior. We're essentially training you to hydrate better.

How does the smart cap work?

Miles: We deliberately chose a cap as the initial form factor for our product because everyone has a bottle preference, and we wanted to focus on the actual tracking element of hydration. So we didn't care as much what bottle you were using, but we wanted to work on as many bottles as possible to make it convenient for users.

We baked all of our technology into the actual cap element, and a couple of really notable things we did with the design was to focus on real-time hydration tracking. Our system continuously knows where you're at regarding hydration throughout the day. Also, as you're drinking, it's measuring your hydration levels and comparing that to where you should be. The smart cap also gives you real-time feedback in the form of a light that signals different colors depending on your hydration status to push you to adopt healthy habits around hydration.

What inspired you to tackle this problem to begin with?

Miles: The early origins of PÜL was an extreme sports hydration system. That project started in college as an innocent project to build something cool that I needed for myself. As that evolved, I got deeper into the space, and it became more evident that this is an excellent thing and we can do a lot here. Then Jock was here, and more people got involved, and we started to see where all the holes in the current ecosystem of hydration are. Since then, we have built a fantastic team - we've got some of the best scientists in the world covering the topic of hydration and how it affects human behavior. We leveraged all that to build what we think is the best platform for tracking, integrating, and training hydration.

How important is building a community for PÜL's journey?

Jock: I'll jump into this. So if you think of the whole system and where we're going in the cognitive behavior loop and the training loop - right now, the rewards we build in the community system and the lighting parts on our cap are the things that are driving it and giving you the rewards, right? For example, Miles might ping me: "Hey, I'm ahead of you with hydration today," - which creates a sense of urgency and competitiveness, and it's the same with the lighting on the cap, right? It goes from a red state to a blue state when you hit the trend for the day. And all these things release endorphins and get you encouraged to keep going. That's why the community, the leaderboards, the streaks, and all those things are so important. Particularly as we're building the sort of data behind neural networks. What we're working towards on the community side is that - whether it's a cue to take a drink, a light on the cap, a message in the app, or your watch buzzing - we measure how long it takes you to get hydrated after that.

We track exactly how much you drink and how long it takes you to drink after we queue you, and so by doing all that, we gather data to build our neural networks. And now, you know, take the bottle away for a second. I still know from your biometric sensors, even just through an app where you are, Halvard, like, I know that you just woke up, and this is what it will take to get you to drink today. So through this process, I can start queuing you without the presence of the bottle to begin triggering these things in your mind.

Modifying your behavior like that is similar to some cognitive behavior therapies we see with mental health. For example, we're training people to hydrate better, and the gamification aspect is super important right now to help us build solid habits and communities in the long term.

What are the biggest challenges so far?

Jock: A core part of our vision is that we're guided by science, not hyperbole. Essentially we could've released our product two and a half years ago. Still, we wanted to wait to launch our product until we had been through all the scientific and clinical trials and agreed with our science team that our product was highly efficient and ready for deployment.

Miles: Another big challenge for us has been accessing wearable data and live-streaming data from different wearable devices. Terra has been hugely important for us in this process. As I mentioned earlier, hydration is complicated as it's not a static concept. You need to drink not one fixed volume daily - for example, eight glasses daily. It depends on your activity, weather, humidity, environmental factors, body mass, and many other things that impact hydration. This is dynamic every day, so for an average person, it's impossible to compute all of these factors in one's head to determine how much to drink.

Our partnership with Terra allows us access to all of these data streams, which is essential for understanding each individual's unique needs across multiple wearables. For example, Terra gives us data insights into people's workouts, calorie intake, sleep data, and other activities, which allows us to adjust their hydration needs based on this input.

Quick pause: Jock takes a sip of his PÜL bottle as his smart cap indicates that he needs to hydrate

What are your big goals and vision for the future?

Jock: I think if we look at the state of healthcare and the obscene amounts spent on healthcare not only in the United States but also worldwide - I'm certainly not the first to call it "sick care." However, if you flip it, you find a void and an excellent opportunity to improve wellness and health above the funnel before people get sick.

I recently came across this 30-year-long study that found that hydration will increase longevity and decrease the likelihood of getting a chronic disease. There's so much happening in healthcare from the standpoint of improving longevity and reducing the risk of chronic diseases.

So if we can train people to hydrate better, build consistent healthy habits, and decrease the likelihood of people getting sick, that's great. But unfortunately, about 6 out of 10 people in America have some form of chronic disease, and most of them are impacted by a lack of hydration in some form.

We don't need to move the needle that much to make a huge difference. And it's just that little change in somebody's life, wellness, behavior, and what they get out of life as a result, right? So, that is our ultimate goal - to improve human performance through hydration.

What do you think is the future of wearable technology?

Jock: Having spent much of my time in the wearables space, it's amazing to see how much the area has transformed since the early days of Fitbit and their fight to normalize biometrics tracking through wearables in the fitness industry. Now we're getting to the point where many players are getting on board, such as Whoop, Oura, Garmin, Fitbit, Google, and the Quantified Self space. We also see many more FDA certifications here in the United States. In addition, I'm talking to companies starting to track blood pressure and hydration through wearables. The space will keep evolving and moving the needle from traditional "sick care" to more modern longitudinal healthcare.

Miles: I would love to add some things to this, particularly our connection with Terra. The future of the wearable space lies in the power of integrations between all the different types of data streams from different providers and biometrics. For example, you have specific wearables like heart rate monitors, sleep trackers, and hydration. However, the future of the wearable space will become more valuable when you put all these data streams together as a whole picture instead of just looking at one piece at a time. I appreciate your work at Terra, as it allows us to do just that, and that's part of why we're so excited to work with you.