💧  This startup stays cool

👋  Good morning. If you’re planning a wedding — congrats! And, maybe, don’t? The average US wedding now costs $34.2k, according to The Knot, with cost largely varying depending on which state you’re getting married in. Weddings average $17k in Wyoming and run all the way up to $57k in New Jersey. Oh, you thought that was bad? New York City, specifically, averages $88k. Ouch.

NEWS FLASH 

🐝  A buzzy new startup: Pollenity is putting IoT sensors on beehives to monitor colony health metrics — temperature, humidity, and buzzing frequency — and alert beekeepers if something’s wrong. The Bulgarian startup’s latest product, EcoPulse, analyzes the pollen brought back to a hive and detects for heavy metals, pesticides, and other contaminants, transforming beehives into environmental monitors. Is your sweet tooth tingling? The company’s Adopt-a-Hive program lets you support a local beekeeper in return for some sweet, sweet honey.

💧  Lighter meals gain a heavier wallet: British startup MicroLub has a promising pitch: its technology can apparently reduce a food’s fat and calorie content by up to 75% without sacrificing flavor and texture. MicroLub’s process, which just earned it a $10m check, replaces fat content with water-derived microgels. They will also try using their tech to boost protein count in foods to appeal to the ever-growing contingent of GLP-1 users.

🤱🏻  Skip the waiting room: Toronto-based Bird&Be raised $13m to sell fertility supplements and at-home tests for women and men. The startup, which wants to reach customers before they book an appointment at a fertility clinic, attributes ~75% of its revenue to subscriptions and sells its products in Ulta Beauty stores. Fertility is one of the most-funded women’s health segments, per PwC, with $14B+ invested between 2020 and 2025 and the market projected to reach $45B by 2030.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Ho, ho, ho, oh, no: Gordon Companies Inc., which owns Christmas.com among other holiday decor sellers, filed for bankruptcy. But breathe easy, Christmas isn’t canceled — the company blamed its troubles on a failed inventory and fulfillment system.

• Weird choice: All Hopped Up, a new energy drink from C4, will taste like a light beer for some reason. It’ll seemingly try to capitalize on the success of nonalcoholic beers while also boasting the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee.
  

• A Bigfoot bounty: Hard Mountain Dew, the soft drink’s alcoholic companion brand, is offering $1m to anyone who can prove Bigfoot is real, cementing its place as the drink of choice for unwell people.
  

• Doing whey too much: The proteinification of everything has grown so out of hand that whey, a byproduct of cheesemaking, now generates more than half of US dairy processors’ net profit, effectively making cheese the byproduct of whey production. 
  

SCALING SECRETS

Startup-ing lessons you won’t find in textbooks

Like, what to do when selling your company. Why you should always hire slow. The “25 bad ideas” method. And start today, because you’ll never know everything.

Explore 72 lessons on scaling shared by founders, CEOs, VPs, and legends in the trenches.

How we grilled 24 big shots:

1. What do you wish you knew earlier as an entrepreneur?
   
2. What are some trends or ideas you’re obsessed with lately?
   
3. Unconventional tips that make you a better operator?

Startup scaling secrets

THE BIG IDEA

Can this startup cool data centers without water?

What is the worth of water? We may not know until the river runs dry.

However, we will certainly recognize how undervalued it was when staring at dry, cracked sand.

Data centers are becoming one of America's largest water users, chugging millions of gallons to cool servers.

A problem David Tearse, Karman Industries' CEO, has pondered for years.

He may have uncovered a promising solution.

"It's a closed-loop cooling system, so it's filled once," Tearse told The Hustle. "We do not consume water continuously for our system as an evaporative cooling or cooling tower system would use."

Powering up

Karman Industries was launched in 2024 near Los Angeles by Tearse and CTO Chiranjeev Kalra with a simple mission: develop thermal energy systems to enhance efficiency and reduce costs for manufacturers, data centers, and geothermal and nuclear reactors.

"We want to build the next generation of thermal infrastructure layer utilizing technology out of the aerospace and automotive industries," Tearse said. "It's a big-step function change in terms of overall footprint and performance — systems designed much more specifically for the AI workloads."

Simply put: Karman's replacing old industrial heating and cooling systems with rocket and EV technology — using far less energy and water.

According to Karman, the technology delivers:

• Around 300%-1k% efficiency from heat pumps using recycled waste heat — cutting energy consumption by 75%+ compared to gas boilers, per a case study by manufacturing tech company and Karman partner Ketiv.
  
• Twenty-five percent less energy than conventional cooling using Karman's Heat Processing Unit (HPU).
  
• HPUs that eliminate water consumption without drawing from traditional cooling systems.
  
• A 60%+ mechanical yard reduction, freeing up land for compute capacity. 

Gaining steam

There are multiple challenges for the ~40-employee Karman, including environmental factors stemming from current data centers and the industry.

And 97% of the water used by US data centers comes from the same source as household water, per a July 2026 Congressional Research Service report.

• US data centers used an estimated 17B gallons in 2023.
  
• A single 100-megawatt facility can use as much water daily as 2.6k households.

Even after raising over $30m in funding so far, the startup is competing against billion-dollar companies with proven track records of scalability and funding. The big bet that sets them apart:

"We use CO2 as our refrigerant," Tearse says, "which is very different from what's out there today."

On what's next, he said, "There's been quite a bit of traction. I'll be able to share more about that in the coming quarters."

Share this story

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

AI psychosis: Thousands are already experiencing it, and one man is trying to find a way to treat it before it spreads. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

How much more CEOs of the 100 largest, low-wage corporations made, on average, than their workers in 2025, according to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies via The Guardian. Between 2019 and 2025, CEO compensation rose 41.4%, compared to 20.7% for the median worker, roughly five percentage points below the inflation rate.

This includes companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Starbucks, which regularly attract public scrutiny but look like reasonable employers compared to telecom giant Lumentum Holdings, whose CEO made a whopping 2,884x more than the company’s median worker.

HOW YOU HUSTLE

You guys are always up to cool things. This is our weekly spotlight on a Hustle reader's ambitious venture.

Founder: Brock Bowers

Building: Tip Taps LLC — a flushable hygiene wipe and dispenser designed specifically for public urinals, mounted right next to the fixture like any other restroom paper product.

Edge: Born from a very relatable problem, Tip Taps is already running a pilot inside two Class A office buildings in downtown Oklahoma City, with a goal of putting dispensers in public restrooms nationwide.

Advice: "The product will sell itself."

Working on something cool? Tell us here.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1806, American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned to Missouri from their journey exploring the territory of the Louisiana Purchase.

🚙  Game: Drive through a slimy Silicon Valley.

🤫  That’s nice: A quiet submarine office for your second monitor.

📷 Reality check: Guess if the image is real or AI.

🦛  Aww: Maple the pygmy hippo calf.

SHOWER THOUGHT

One praise for restaurant food is that it tastes home-cooked. And for home cooking is that it tastes like a restaurant. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley, Singdhi Sokpo, and Bill Meincke.

Editing by: Sara "Cue the water work" Friedman.

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