Wisewell CEO Sami Khoreibi reveals how his company built a global solution by offering 'water as a service' via subscription

Having founded companies across multiple continents and run operations in dozens of countries, Sami Khoreibi, Founder and CEO of Wisewell, is a veteran entrepreneur. For Khoreibi, the UAE provided the perfect market to build a product, refine the brand and customer experience, scale the business, and eventually expand globally. Through Wisewell, Khoreibi is innovating in a resource that is becoming increasingly crucial—and is even predicted to be a source of future conflicts: clean water.

In an interview with THE WEEK, Khoreibi speaks about his technology and the lessons India could learn from the UAE’s approach to water.

Q. How does Wisewell turn tap water into clean, great-tasting, mineralised water, removing contaminants while keeping the minerals?

Most taps in the world already deliver water that is 95 per cent of the way there. The last 5 per cent is where the problems live - arsenic and fluoride in groundwater, bacteria and viruses, nitrates and pesticide residue from farmland, iron and heavy metals, the hardness and high TDS that scale your kettle, lead from old pipes, then chlorine, pharmaceuticals, PFAS, microplastics, and in a lot of cities, simply bad taste. We built Wisewell to solve that last 5 per cent at the point of consumption, in the home or office, instead of shipping single servings of water around the world in plastic.

The system works in four stages. Sediment and carbon stages take out the particles, chlorine and taste. A reverse osmosis membrane then takes the water to its most purified form, removing up to 99 per cent of what is left, down to the molecular level. Reverse osmosis on its own strips everything, including the minerals that make water good for you and good to drink, so the final stage brings the water back to life. Our mineralisation process restores the flavour, texture and pH, with a profile aligned to the most premium waters on the market.

That is the part people underestimate. Because we take the water all the way down and then rebuild it, Wisewell water is consistent everywhere. Whether the tap is in Dubai, Delhi or Dallas, the water that comes out is equally pure, with the same taste, texture and pH. The input can vary wildly. The output does not. The only thing that changes is how often the filters need replacing, and that is not something our users think about. The sensors inside the device and its connectivity detect when a filter is due and we deliver the new one to the subscriber automatically. All they do is swap it in, which is about as easy as changing a light bulb.

The app shows you what is in your water and how much you are drinking. Depending on the model it dispenses still, chilled, hot or sparkling. It is countertop, plugs into a socket, and needs no plumbing.

Q. What prompted you to build Wisewell, and what gap were you addressing?

I spent a decade building the first solar company in the Arab world from Abu Dhabi. When we sold that business, I was looking for the next system that was obviously broken and ready to be reinvented. Drinking water was staring at me from the fridge.

We fill a plastic bottle with a single serving of water, put it on a ship or a plane, and drink it months later after the plastic has already leached into it. Bottled water is a $400 billion industry producing over 600 billion plastic bottles a year. It is bad for the planet, bad for our wallets, and increasingly clear that it is bad for our health. A family drinking three bottles a day goes through over a thousand bottles a year, and the research on how much microplastic and nano-plastic that puts into the body is getting harder to ignore.

The gap was that the alternatives were ugly, complicated, or both. Filtration was a faceless appliance, a grey box under the sink that nobody understood or maintained. We wanted to do for water what Tesla did for the electric car - make the better choice the beautiful, intelligent, effortless choice. One device, one monthly subscription, everything included: the machine, the filters, the service, the data. Water as a service rather than water as a product.

Q. How did the Dubai ecosystem shape Wisewell's early product development, go-to-market and expansion? What advantages or constraints came with it?

The UAE is the perfect market to build a product, refine the brand and experience, scale it, and expand globally. I say that having founded companies on multiple continents and run operations in dozens of countries.

Three things make it so. First, the diversity of cultures. Residents from over 200 nationalities, so from day one your customers are Emirati, Indian, European, American and everyone in between. If a product works here, it has been tested against the tastes and expectations of the whole world. Second, it is an incredibly competitive market. Every global brand is here and every one of them is fighting for the same customer. Third, customer expectations on quality, design and service are as high as anywhere on earth. People here have seen the best, and they compare you to it. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

What that pressure produces is operational excellence. We developed, refined and built the product, the brand and the way we deliver and service it in a market with representation from all over the world and the highest standards anywhere. The design, the mineral profile, the app, the delivery and install, the service model, all of it was sharpened in the UAE against the toughest audience we could find.

The other side is what the country gives you to build with. Human capital: Our team is 15 nationalities, all of whom chose to make the UAE home, and we can recruit world-class talent here that would take years to assemble elsewhere. Distribution infrastructure: the UAE sits at the crossroads of the world, a single flight from Shenzhen where we manufacture, from India, and from North America where we are launching, with the world's busiest international airport and one of its largest ports next door. And ease of doing business of the highest global standard. Setting up took days, not months, and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism, the free zones, the innovation programmes, the banks and the family offices all lean in. It is a place where a founder can get a meeting, and where government treats business as a partner rather than an applicant.

The UAE's scale also encourages businesses to think internationally from the outset. We designed Wisewell with global expansion in mind, and the UAE gave us the ideal base to build and scale our product to international markets. We have now entered one of the most exciting markets in the world, the United States. We have spent the last couple of months in soft launch, and the fourth quarter of this year is our full launch into America. It includes signed or late-stage agreements with major sporting franchises, the largest media outlets and networks, and leading names in technology and wellness, all of whom have validated that a product made and matured in the UAE is ready to take on the USA and the globe. The problem we solve is not just in our own backyard. It is global. The UAE gave us a home and the ambition to go well beyond it.

Q. How has Wisewell built operational and financial resilience? What are the challenges since the US-Iran conflict began and how has the Dubai ecosystem responded?

I have been building companies in the UAE for nearly two decades. My ventures have lived through the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Covid, and now the attacks on the UAE since February 28. Every time, this country has come back stronger, and every time it has done that by standing beside the people and businesses that call it home.

Wisewell was built to be a distributed form of drinking water infrastructure. We put the perfect drinking water plant in kitchens, offices and buildings throughout the UAE, and we give each of our users drinking water resilience: unlimited premium still and sparkling water, on demand. From a logistics perspective, we can hydrate populations at scale with very limited need for imports. One container of Wisewell purification systems is the equivalent of 900 containers of bottled water. When shipping lanes are clogged, our water still flows.

The February 28 attacks were a shock. We manufacture in Shenzhen and import by sea, and overnight those routes were no longer dependable. At the same time, demand surged. I was getting messages from friends and customers about the value of what they called water sovereignty - the certainty of unlimited drinking water at home regardless of what is happening outside. Our team worked through the night to cut delivery time from three days to one, and we pushed harder to get systems into as many homes as we could. It was our small way of contributing.

What happened next is the part I want people to understand about Dubai. Ten days into the conflict, I received an invitation from the leadership of the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism to a Majlis of hundreds of business leaders together with senior government, military and airline leadership. His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai, walked over to our table, sat with eight founders from different sectors, and told us plainly that Dubai would come back stronger. We were asked to share our challenges. Ours was simple: demand up, inventory tightening, sea freight choking. Within days the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) team had connected us with Emirates Cargo to work on air freight. Senior government and a national carrier moving at that speed for a drinking-water startup, in the middle of an attack on the country. I do not know where else that happens.

In Emirati poetry, there is the handhal, a bitter desert fruit that thrives where nothing else can. His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, used the same image a few days into the attacks: the UAE has thick skin and bitter flesh, and is not easy prey. That is the country I know. The result for us: our best months on record have been during this period, our user base is on track to nearly triple and our revenue to nearly quadruple this year, and tens of thousands of people are drinking Wisewell water every day.

Q. Is India a market Wisewell is looking to enter? What would need to adapt in technology, pricing and subscription for India?

We are solving a global problem and we have global ambitions. India presents itself as a great opportunity for future expansion.

Two things make it attractive. Purification is already popular in India, which is a good thing. People understand why it matters, and a population of that size allows a solution like ours to be embraced at real scale. The model always needs refinement and localisation to respect local practices, infrastructure and nuances, and we would do that work properly. But the core does not change. Anywhere you see the global premium mineral water imports on shelves, in restaurants and in homes, Wisewell is ready to take them on. We are making purification an upgrade, not just for health and the planet, but for design, taste and experience.

The Wisewell Sparkle is the clearest example of that. It gives you still, chilled, hot and best-in-class sparkling water from one countertop device, so the most expensive bottles in the fridge, the imported sparkling ones, are the first to go, which saves our users even more money. It is connected, tracks how much you drink, and integrates with the wearables people already use, so hydration becomes an input to the quantified self alongside sleep, steps and heart rate. Water is the most basic health metric there is, and until now nobody was measuring it.

The bonds between the UAE and India are old, strong and deep. At the leadership level, in commerce and trade, geographically and culturally, the two countries are as close as any in the world. We see India as a wonderful place to land when the time is right.

Q. What can India's fast-growing cities learn from Dubai's approach to water?

The UAE was born water-scarce and treated water as a strategic priority from the beginning. The biggest lesson is that mindset: water is infrastructure, it is security, and it is a system, not a commodity you buy in a bottle.

A few specifics that I think travel well:

• Invest in the source. The UAE built the desalination and treatment capacity to guarantee supply to every home, in a country with almost no fresh water of its own. Reliable supply is the foundation. Quality at the point of consumption is the layer companies like ours add on top.
• Set a national target and lead from the top. The UAE Water Security Strategy 2036 gives everyone, government and private sector, the same direction. Dubai's own Dubai Can initiative, launched by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan, put refill stations across the city and has kept tens of millions of single-use bottles out of circulation, with the whole city behind it.
• Regulate plastic with a plan. The UAE phased out single-use plastic bags and is expanding the ban to other single-use plastics on a published timeline, which gives businesses time to adapt and consumers a reason to change.
• Let the private sector into the last mile. Government sets the standard and builds the backbone. Companies like ours solve the final metres into the home, the office, the hotel and the stadium. That partnership is what makes the UAE work.
• Measure it. What gets measured gets fixed. Every Wisewell device counts the bottles it has replaced. Our customers have so far offset over 12.8 million plastic bottles, and through our partnership with Splash we have donated over 26 million servings of clean water to schools that lack it. Cities can do the same at their scale.

India's cities are growing at a pace the UAE will recognise. The answer is not more bottles. It is treating water the way the UAE treats it: as a strategic system, built with ambition, and delivered with the same quality you would expect from any world-class city.