The Story Behind Sponge

Most companies have an origin story that sounds better than it was. Ours is not especially glamorous. It is mostly about a grandmother, an ambulance and a bag of IV fluid.

It happened three more times in those two years. Each ambulance ride and hospital stay cost more than $5,000, and that was with insurance. The cost of round-the-clock care meant the family had to pitch in, so Chris’s mom was driving two hours, three or four days a week, to help.

Nobody in that story did anything wrong. The problem was that nobody — not the family, not the people caring for her, not his grandmother herself — had a reliable way to know how much she had actually had to drink that day.

That turns out to be the normal state of things, not bad luck. Dehydration in older adults is common and hard to see: thirst fades with age, and a Cochrane review found that none of the usual bedside signs reliably detect it¹. In one UK hospital study, 37% of adults aged 65 and over who were admitted as emergencies arrived dehydrated². We wrote the long version, with the research, in The Dehydration Problem.

The other grandmother

Nathan’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease. Watching her lose her independence sent him looking for anything a person could actually do, day to day, to look after their health over the long run. There are not many dials you control directly. How much you drink is one of them.

He is also a competitive athlete — a marathon finisher who races triathlon in Orange County — so hydration was already part of his training, and he felt the difference in how he trained and recovered. The research backs up the everyday part of that: even mild dehydration shows up in mood, concentration and fatigue in healthy young adults^3,4. What research cannot yet tell anyone is whether drinking more water protects the ageing brain. That science is still young, and we do not claim it does.

Two founders, two grandmothers, one conclusion. Most people know they should drink more water, and almost nobody actually does. Knowing was never the missing piece.

Version zero was a coaster

Nathan Katzaroff and Christopher Miglio are both Cal Poly San Luis Obispo graduates, and Dominic Dal Porto builds Sponge’s app and firmware. The first Sponge was not a clip at all. It was a coaster: you set your drink on it, and it logged what was gone each time you put the drink back down.

The coaster proved the idea. Weight is a good way to measure what someone drinks, and it asks nothing of the person except putting the cup down. It also showed us the catch. A coaster only works where the coaster is. You had to come back to it after every sip, and the moment your bottle left the desk, the record stopped.

We built our first pitch around care facilities, because that is where the problem is most concentrated: a device at every bedside, and a view for the people doing the caring. The more we worked on it, the clearer it became that the sensor had to go wherever the drink goes.

Then it became a clip

So we moved the sensor off the table and onto the bottle. The Sponge Clip attaches magnetically to the bottom of the bottle you already own — steel, plastic or glass. Every time you set the bottle down, a load cell and an accelerometer take a weight reading, and an on-device algorithm turns the change between readings into your water intake. You drink the way you always have.

The first Clips shipped in the spring of 2026, and more than 100 Sponge products have now shipped to customers.

Why your phone gets involved

Measuring solves half the problem. A number on a screen tells you that you are behind; it does not make you do anything about it. Reminders are the same, and they are easy to swipe away.

So we built App Lock. You choose the apps you lose time to, and they stay locked until you have hit your water goal. It is a little brutal. It is also the most direct way we know to turn a good intention into something you actually do.

Where we are going

We are a small team and we build in batches. Three things are in progress right now:

• A caregiver view, so family and care staff can see who is falling behind — the tool Chris’s family never had.
• Apple Health sync, in testing now and shipping with the next app update.
• The Sponge Dot, a one-button logger for people who want something simpler than measurement.

That is still the job. See how Sponge works, or meet the team.

Sponge is a general wellness product. It measures how much you drink. It does not assess your hydration status, and it is not a medical device — if you care for someone with a condition that affects fluid balance, their clinician sets the target, not an app.