Founders of Shower Stream: Priya Thomas and Greg Floyd

When people stay in hotels, they often do things they would never consider doing at home. Guests leave showers running for hours as white noise, a makeshift humidifier, or even to steam wrinkles out of their clothes. They are not paying for the water, and it’s not their room that is getting damaged. What feels harmless to a hotel guest can become an expensive problem for the hotel beyond the wasted water, resulting in mold, odors, water damage, negative guest reviews, insurance claims, costly repairs, and lost revenue from rooms being placed out of order.

The answer is NOT another complicated app, keypad or Bluetooth gadget. The last thing a tired, hungry, jet-lagged guest wants is to figure out a new system before they can take a hot shower. The solution has to be effortless, touch-free, invisible and private. What if you could choke off almost all of the flow when the water is warm, and just release it when someone steps into the shower?

Enter, Shower Stream. Priya Thomas, Greg Floyd and the team at Shower Stream developed a next-generation occupancy sensor that shuts off the flow to showers once they’re hot and unoccupied. The shower water and energy savings average 20-40% per hotel and this quarter alone saved over 100,000 gallons of water and 100 kWh energy with just 500 shower heads installed.

Beyond the savings, the data from every shower powers a Data Analytics Platform for hotels to benchmark properties, improve operations, and track ESG performance at scale. You can think of it as an operating system for commercial showers. The team is focused on increasing its install base with large hotel portfolios including Extended Stay America, Motel6 and the U.S. Department of Defense.

By turning one of hospitality’s most overlooked liabilities into automated, measurable savings, Shower Stream helps hotels reduce waste, prevent damage, improve profitability, and deliver a better guest experience through luxury showers and lower indoor humidity.

More about Shower Stream

“IoT Showerheads Save Hotels $20 Per Room” – The Diligent Observer 10/30/25

“From our very first meetings, it was clear that Kerry and Sara would bring far more value than capital alone. Their drive, detailed perspectives, experience, and strategic insights immediately felt like the kind of mentor-investor partnership that could help accelerate Shower Stream toward the growth we’re targeting.”– Priya Thomas, PhD

Co-Founder and Data Scientist: Priya Thomas, PhD
Headquarters: Austin, TX

Meet Priya Thomas

Co-Founder and Data Scientist: Priya Thomas, PhD

Background:

Priya Thomas, Co-founder and Data Scientist of Shower Stream, is a scientist with a PhD in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics from the University of Rhode Island and multiple publications focused on natural resource and decision-making. She has led the Company’s product strategy, behavioral data architecture, fundraising, and early commercial development.

Her focus before Shower Stream was on natural resources and decision-making under uncertainty, using economic and statistical models to analyze behavioral patterns and predict human decisions. After years of working with fragmented and difficult-to-capture datasets, she became increasingly interested in the value of point-of-use resource data. That interest led to her co-founding Shower Stream to build one of the first real-world datasets focused on water use behavior inside buildings, combining sensing technology, behavioral analytics, and infrastructure data to better understand point-of-use water consumption.

Why Start Shower Stream?
Did you know that 1% of hotel showers last over 4 hours? I didn’t either until I saw the data. I have spent a decade studying behavior, even published a few papers and here’s what I’ve learned: most solutions to behavioral waste are focused on changing behavior. Today, we have better tools: sensor tech, big data, AI, and automation. We can automate away waste instead of fighting behavior. That’s the idea behind Shower Stream.

I teamed up with my co-founders Greg Floyd, CEO and software engineer, and Ian Howard, Mechatronics Engineer, to build a solution that captures valuable point-of-use data and completely eliminates shower behavioral water and energy waste – at the source without disrupting the guest experience. We’re turning a huge hidden source of waste into measurable savings, which is why we’re able to break into the shower market with a SaaS model.

Hotel showers are just the starting point. The bigger opportunity is building smart infrastructure and real-world behavioral data around how the built environment uses water, energy, and resources.

Why Seek Venture Capital?
Shower Stream has always had more demand than supply. Venture funding gives us the ability to grow our team, deliver on rapidly growing customer commits, and accelerate to exponential growth faster than bootstrapping ever could. With a first-of-its-kind product, speed matters. Venture funding lets us scale ahead of the market instead of growing incrementally through cash flow.

Why True Wealth Ventures?
True Wealth’s thesis strongly aligns with a gender-diverse founding team like ours. From our very first meetings, it was clear that Kerry and Sara would bring far more value than capital alone. Their drive, detailed perspectives, experience, and strategic insights immediately felt like the kind of mentor-investor partnership that could help accelerate Shower Stream toward the growth we’re targeting.

Have you seen women General Partners bring a different perspective
Although not many, I’ve had the pleasure of working with and learning from a few women in executive positions, specifically Faith Davis at Exelon and Christine Boyle at Burnt Island Ventures. I’ve noticed their perspective is often more grounded in customer understanding, highly detail-oriented around operations and long-term execution. Those conversations pushed me to think about the business from angles I hadn’t fully considered before and helped strengthen how I think about customer experience, execution, and growth.

Is a woman’s perspective valuable to this market?
Yes! The shower market has a strong comfort, wellness, and guest-experience component to it, so having a woman’s perspective is crucial. Consumer research shows women are highly influential in bathroom purchase decisions: Industry studies found women purchase more than half of bathroom accessories and fixtures. Showers are highly personal experiences, and understanding usability, routines, comfort, and expectations from diverse users helps us better position, grow, and establish the product in the market.

Words of Wisdom:
In a startup, we’re constantly firefighting. What helps when you’re in the middle of putting out short-term fires is taking a few minutes to reset and reconnect with the bigger picture. Remind yourself what change you’re actually trying to create and what the next step is to get there. Then, go back to solving problems with more clarity and purpose.