This Harvard dropout and her brother launched a company to conserve liquids in factories
David and Annie Lu, siblings and co-founders of H20k Innovations
Photo courtesy David and Annie Lu
Annie Lu was a student at Harvard when Covid-19 brought the world to a screeching halt, including her own college experience.
“I remember in March of 2020 basically being kicked off campus and everything going virtual,” Lu, 22, told CNBC in a video interview in June. At the end of the spring semester in 2020, Lu’s sophomore year, she did not return to school.
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She hasn’t looked back since.
That’s because Lu, and her older brother David, 25, have since launched and are now growing their own company, H2Ok Innovations, which uses a combination of hardware and software to improve the efficiency of factories by reducing how much liquid they use.
“I can’t speak to what would have been, but what I can say is it was such an easy decision for me to make and it was so obvious,” Annie told CNBC. “The trade-off was virtually nothing.”
Leaving Harvard and becoming obsessed with improving factory efficiency with your older brother might seem like a surprising move.
But there is a deep family connection: Annie and David’s paternal grandfather started a factory in China that manufactured specialty fine chemicals, and their dad worked for the family’s chemical-manufacturing business. So did Annie and David’s uncles. And they were proud to do so. “As with every family business, everyone is involved in the family business,” Annie told CNBC.
David was born in Saskatoon, Canada, and at age 1 moved to the Bay Area, where Annie was born. Their parents are immigrants from China.
Annie Lu visiting her family’s factory in China when she was younger.
Photo courtesy Annie Lu
When Annie and David were young, their grandfather, who was deeply passionate about chemistry, taught them chemical reactions and how various pieces of industrial equipment worked. Also as kids, Annie and David would tour their family’s factories and learn about chemical factory parts, like the distillation towers. The idea of “lean manufacturing” was also a topic of conversation in the family.
“I remember in elementary and middle school spending summers touring factories, and having exposure to large scale industrial equipment, understanding how they work. We grew up in the sector,” Annie told CNBC. “That’s where our inspiration germinated from, I would say.”
Since officially launching their sibling enterprise in March 2021, H20k Innovations has raised $6.8 million from investors including Construct Capital, Flybridge Capital, Techstars, 1517 Fund and 2048 Ventures. The company is headquartered out of Greentown Labs in Boston, and is booking revenue. Annie and David were recognized as 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 and in March, H20k Innovations was recognized at Unilever’s annual supplier summit and granted the “Start-up of the Year Award.”
Annie and David Lu at a Harvard Innovation Labs event, when they were still ideating.
Photo courtesy Annie and David Lu
The two started the company just as Covid-19 disrupted supply chains globally, bringing the importance of manufacturing into the spotlight.
“The pandemic exposing gaps within manufacturing and industrials … was an inspiration” for launching H20k, Annie said. “It was a perfect opportunity.”
From Techstars in Minnesota to setting up shop in Boston
In fall 2020, Annie and David moved to Minneapolis for the Techstars Farm to Fork program, which accepted them based on previous projects.
“Annie and I love hacking and building things together,” David told CNBC. “We work really well with each other. There are so many projects we have built in our upbringing when we were growing up.”
Annie and David Lu at the Farm to Form TechStars Accelerator.
Photo courtesy Annie and David Lu
They came to Techstars with the idea of developing a low-cost technology to identify contamination in natural waterways and drinking water. But as part of the program, Annie and David got access to 120 executive leaders in various parts of food tech, and they asked those executives what their biggest headaches were.
Eventually, they decided to focus on improving the efficiency of liquid use in manufacturing processes.
“Liquids and fluids are at the heart of it in production process in so many different sectors,” Annie said, including food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, semiconductor making and cooling commercial buildings and factories. “It is such a large white space, and an area where there exists a lot of gaps.”
By the end of Techstars, Annie and David had their vision for H2Ok Innovations set and started to execute.
They came up with the idea of using a combination of physical sensors and software to measure and optimize both the use and composition of liquids and fluids in manufacturing. Their process involves collecting that data and using their software to combine the liquids data with other factory and facilities data in what Annie calls a “very, very versatile” internet-of-things system.
Conventionally, data that is gathered in a factory stays on premises. “We’re basically unlocking previously untapped data streams,” Annie said.
Improving the efficient use of liquids in manufacturing processes reduces waste and lost product, which means the factories are also operating more sustainably.
In 2021, David joined Annie in Boston worked out of a space called Artisan’s Asylum for about six months and then moved into Greentown Labs.
Annie and David Lu with members of the H2Ok Innovations team at the Unilever Ben and Jerry’s facility.
Photo courtesy Annie and David Lu
In fall of 2021 and early 2022, Annie and David participated in the 100+ Accelerator program, a virtual accelerator program run by Unilever in partnership with AB InBev, the Coca Cola Co. and Colgate-Palmolive.
“The aim of the 100+ Accelerator program is to rapidly fuel the growth of startups developing sustainability solutions including reducing energy used in supply chains. Through the partnership, we work directly with entrepreneurs to refine and test their new technologies in our businesses, to put their solutions on an accelerated path to deliver a positive impact towards our sustainability goals,” Sandeep Desai, the Unilever ice cream chief product supply officer, told CNBC in a written statement.
“These startups operate across many fields including new packaging technologies, digital and geospatial solutions and new ways to upcycle product ingredients, that would otherwise be considered as waste,” Desai said.
As part of this partnership, Unilever tested the H2Ok Innovations solution at its Ben & Jerry’s facility in Waterbury, Vermont.
“At our Waterbury Ice Cream Sourcing Unit, our partnership has allowed for an 18% reduction in downtime during cleaning, which increases productivity and lowers costs in the supply chain. We have also saved 40% of a cleaning cycle’s water consumption by using the technology,” Desai said. Unilever is working to implement the H2Ok solution at other non-ice cream facilities in the U.S. and Brazil, Desai said.
In spring 2021, the siblings raised their first round of funding, and added to that during summer of 2022. H2Ok Innovations now has 17 total employees.
For investors, H2Ok’s value proposition is especially timely, as more manufacturing is coming back to the United States, and those facilities face increasingly strict efficiency standards.
“The U.S. is rising again as a manufacturing powerhouse and there is a compression of the normal technology lifecycle adoption curve in industrial companies and a push to be both innovative and more efficient given decades of intense, global competition,” Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge Capital told CNBC. “U.S. manufacturers have a strong climate and sustainability mandate, compelling them to be even more precise with their usage of liquids and energy.”
Plus, some investors see an inevitability to the sensor technology H2Ok Innovations is using.
“We found the H2Ok’s vision of replacing monolith-based water measurement with a swarm of sensors very compelling. Our thesis is that all measurements and data will be provided in real time and used to optimize operations of plants, data centers, etc.,” Alex Iskold from 2048 Ventures told CNBC. “That’s exactly what H2Ok is building.”
Annie and the H2Ok Innovations team at a customer facility, point up at their technology deployed in a factory.
Photo courtesy Annie Lu
The sibling bond runs deep
All of the investors who spoked to CNBC commented on how impressed they were with Annie and David, which is to be expected of investors doting on their portfolio companies, but still, the glowing accolades were notable and reflect the conviction the siblings share in building in the space their family has worked in for generations.
“They are exceptionally smart, visionary and courageous — the kind of founders investors dream to back,” Iskold told CNBC.
“We invested because they are incredible founders. Annie and David are relentless and incredibly smart, and this is the culture they have built out at H2Ok. They are the right and rare mixture of customer- and problem-oriented, and they have executed well to build a defensible technical solution that fits the customers’ needs,” Dayna Grayson from Construct Capital told CNBC.
“The founders are brilliant technologists and visionaries,” Bussgang from Flybridge Capital told CNBC.
Being siblings brings a level of inherent trust in that’s valuable to both Annie and David, who have been close to each other and the rest of their family their entire lives.
The H2Ok Innovations team at Greentown Labs in Boston, where they are currently headquartered.
Photo courtesy David and Annie Lu.
That trust is invaluable because running a business with employees, partners and customers can get stressful.
“There are hard conversations that need to be had,” Annie said. “We can have these hard conversations in a very, very comfortable way, and hold each other accountable and push each other to be better.”
“We know how to fight, we know how to have hard conversations. We’ve been fighting our whole lives,” David said.
Both Annie and David giggled at this thought. It’s something of a joke, they said, but it’s also serious. Getting through hard conversations is “crucial for the success of a business,” David said.
Their complimentary skill set is a great boon, too.
Annie is creative and an “especially out-of-the-box thinker,” said David. And David is excellent at recognizing patterns across disciplines and executing on technical developments, Annie said.
They also share a philosophy on how to interact with people. They acknowledge that they’re young and that listening to others is important.
“I think this aspect of authenticity, and coming into every single conversation with customers, to users, to mentors, and beyond with deep humility and empathy is so critical to who we are as a team, but particularly who we are as founders,” Annie said.
Technology
Marc Benioff’s call for troops in SF leads tech investor Ron Conway to leave Salesforce Foundation board
Ron Conway, founder of SV Angel, speaks during the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2015 conference in New York on May 4, 2015.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Days after suggesting that President Donald Trump should send federal troops to San Francisco, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is facing some consequences.
Prominent startup investor Ron Conway, who backed companies including Google, Airbnb and Stripe, resigned from the board of the Salesforce Foundation on Thursday, CNBC has confirmed. Conway is a longtime Democratic donor who was a member of VCs for Kamala, and donated around $500,000 to at least two funds tied to Kamala Harris’ unsuccessful 2024 election campaign.
The New York Times was first to report on Conway’s departure from the Salesforce Foundation. A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed his exit in an e-mailed statement.
“We have deep gratitude for Ron Conway and his incredible contributions to the Salesforce Foundation Board for over a decade,” the spokesperson said, noting that the group has donated, “$250 million to public schools and education nonprofits to advance opportunity and access for young people, including $30 million announced this week.”
The Trump administration recently deployed the National Guard to Portland, Oregon and Chicago, sparking protests and lawsuits and resulting in citizens and immigrants being detained without legal representation.
In a story published late last week in the New York Times, Benioff indicated that he would welcome troops to San Francisco, home to Salesforce. The company’s annual Dreamforce conference began in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff told the Times.
Benioff later appeared to walk back his comments, writing on X that safety is “first and foremost, the responsibility of our city and state leaders.” However, by that point Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other right-wing figures had seized on his original comments, amplifying them to their audiences.
Musk, who has drawn criticism for his personal drug use, characterized downtown San Francisco as a “drug zombie apocalypse.” And on Wednesday, Trump called San Francisco “a mess,” and suggested possibly sending in the National Guard.
According to the Times, Conway told Benioff in an email that their “values were no longer aligned.” While Benioff has donated to members of both parties, he has supported Democrats for president, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
Conway is founder and managing partner of SV Angel, an early-stage venture firm. He has long been an advocate for tech in San Francisco, having founded trade organization sf.citi and helping start FWD.us, which focused on immigration reform.
The Salesforce Foundation isn’t his only connection to Benioff’s philanthropic efforts. Conway is also a large donor to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.
Conway didn’t respond to a request for comment.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco leaders on Wednesday issued statements and held press conferences to deliver the message that federal troops are not welcome in the city, and that crime is coming down.
Conway has supported Newsom, including in 2021, when he opposed a recall effort against the Democratic governor.
WATCH: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff sits down with Jim Cramer at Dreamforce 2025
Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2 AI glasses during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
EssilorLuxottica said a healthy amount of its revenue growth in the third quarter was due to its partnership with Meta, primarily from its Ray-Ban brand, to develop and sell smart glasses.
“Clearly there is a lift coming from Ray-Ban Meta wearables as a product category,” CFO Stefano Grassi said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
The European eyewear company said sales in in the quarter grew 11.7% year-over-year to 6.9 billion euros (about $8 billion) from 6.44 billion euros a year earlier. Of that growth, more than 4 percentage points came from wearables, which includes the Meta products, the company said.
In 2019, Meta and Luxottica inked a deal for Ray-Ban Meta branded smart glasses. Most recently, Luxottica’s Oakley brand has joined the partnership, with the debut in June of the Oakley Meta HSTN smart glasses. The companies are also working on a version of the smart glasses to be released under the Prada brand, CNBC reported in June.
Luxottica, which also oversees several popular brands like Vogue Eyewear and Persol, has been heavily pushing internet-connected glasses that work with Meta’s AI-powered digital assistant. The technology allows users to play music, take photos and perform other actions similar to how they would use smartphones.
“We believe that glasses will be the future,” Grassi said, adding that the wearables business is profitable. “Glasses will materially replace most of the functionality that today we have embedded into our phones.”
Grassi’s statement echoes sentiments expressed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said in July that “Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.”
A couple weeks into the fourth quarter, Grassi said he has “a good degree of optimism” for the period, in part because of the rollout of “all the new products that have been recently presented at the Meta Connect,” which will “all play a role in our fourth-quarter profile.”
At the Connect event in September, Zuckerberg revealed the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which have a small digital display that can be manipulated with an accompanying wristband powered by neural technology.
The company also unveiled new smart glasses, including the $499 Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses and the $379 Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) glasses.
Grassi said that Luxottica’s sales growth in North America in the third quarter had more to do with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses than the effects of tariffs, which led to higher prices for its products.
He said the company will be able to reach the 10 million unit capacity that it had originally planned to hit by the end of 2026 earlier than anticipated.
“The overall ecosystem of wearables is going to bring not only revenue associated with the hardware but also the revenue associated with lenses” and over time from services tied to AI.
EssilorLuxottica shares rose 2.4% on Thursday.
Meta isn’t the only tech giant getting into the burgeoning smart glasses market.
Alphabet announced in May a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker to develop smart glasses powered by Google’s Gemini AI digital assistant, while China’s Alibaba unveiled its smart glasses in July that utilize its Quark AI assistant. Apple and OpenAI are also reportedly developing smart glasses.
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