Germany’s air up raises €40M+ to flavour your tap water through scent alone; here’s how

Munich-based air up, a refillable drinking bottle that gives flavour to tap water by using a fragrance, announced that it has raised over €40M in a fresh round of funding. The round was led by Five Seasons Ventures and co-led by existing investors PepsiCo, Ippen.Media, and Oyster Bay.

Niccolo Manzoni, Managing Partner of Five Seasons Ventures says, “At Five Seasons Ventures we back future category leaders in Food Tech. In such a short period of time, air up has delivered exceptional traction in a market where the consumer needs are known to many: more hydration, the reduction of single-use plastic bottles, and increased consumption of healthy drinks. The latest capital raise will fuel the company to expand to a global stage, to make scent-based hydration the new normal.”

Capital utilisation

The proceeds from this round will help the company to accelerate expansion across Europe and the US. The capital will also enable air up to extend their existing product portfolio and establish production facilities to serve customers across continents. 

Speaking on the development, Lena Jüngst, co-founder of air up says, “We are proud of the renewed trust placed in us by our existing investors. We struck a nerve with our innovative product and almost couldn’t meet the high customer demand. We are happy to prove that with a revolutionary idea and a healthy dose of pragmatism, you can bring about change. It underlines our vision to revolutionise the beverage market worldwide and shows that health and sustainability can also be economically attractive.”

The idea behind Air up

Lena Jüngst and Tim Jäger came up with the idea for air up in 2016 during their joint product design studies where they were analysing unhealthy nutrition which leads for example to obesity, diabetes, and coronary heart diseases.

As a solution, they designed the first prototype of the air up bottle that counteracts the nutritional problem with the help of retronasal smelling.

To explain briefly, our brain distinguishes between orthonasal (perceived via nose) and retronasal (perceived via mouth) scent. While orthonasally perceived smell is also interpreted as such by our brain, retronasally perceived scent is interpreted as a part of our taste impression and our brain attributes it to food or drinks in our mouth. This biological connection made it possible for Lena and Tim to flavor simple tap water with a multitude of tastes only via scented air.

Besides Lena Jüngst and Tim Jäger, the company’s other co-founders include Jannis Koppitz (co-CEO, co-founder), Fabian Schlang (COO, co-founder), Simon Nüesch (CMO, co-founder), and Christian Hauth (co-CEO).

How does the air up drinking system work?

The idea is simple: you fill still or sparkling water into the air up bottle, select your favorite taste, and put the scent pod on the head part. Sucking on the silicone attachment creates a suction that not only transports the water but also air from the outside through the fragrance pod into the mouth. 

This is where retronasal olfaction comes into play: in the throat, the flavored air rises from the water and is perceived as taste at the olfactory center. So technically, users tricked their brain and saved their body from proven harmful sweeteners, stabilisers, or acid regulators. Incidentally, the fragrance-air function can be easily activated and deactivated using a sliding mechanism.

Recent growth

air up claims to have doubled its workforce since the beginning of the year and exceeded the entire previous year’s revenue in the first four months of 2021.

Since first launching in the market in July 2019, the company has already reached in excess of €100M revenues and has served more than 1 million customers across Europe. This can lead to a saving of up to 85 million single-use plastic bottles and more than 2.465 tons of sugar.

In January 2021, the scale-up, which was previously backed by prominent investors Frank Thelen (Freigeist) and Ralf Dümmel (DS Produkte), says it had secured investments of around €20M through the participation of, among others, Five Seasons Ventures, Ippen.Media and PepsiCo.

air up now employs around 170 people from 31 countries and celebrated the milestone of more than 1 million customers a few months ago.