Melbourne’s memobottle has spent more than a decade championing flat water bottles. Now it has finally made a round one, and it built the whole thing around a lid you can actually clean.
We last checked in with memobottle when it marked its tenth anniversary with the Elements range of book-sized flat bottles in satin steel, copper and titanium. That slim form factor, designed to slide into a laptop bag beside your mobile workstation, has defined the company since its first Kickstarter campaign in 2014.
The memo Round is a bit of a U-turn, then. Co-founders Jesse Leeworthy and Jonno Byrt said they would only release a round bottle if it improved on the ones already out there, and they’ve zeroed in on one problem: grimy lids.
Insulated bottles have become everyday accessories, but lids are typically a maze of channels, seals, and straws that trap water where a sponge can’t reach. A few designs have tried to fix this, like the twist-apart Eureka tumbler, and the memo Round is the latest to make easy cleaning its headline feature.
The bottle’s lid comes apart into just three pieces: the straw lifts out, an internal plug pops free, and the mouthpiece detaches. No tools are needed, and memobottle says the whole teardown takes about three seconds, leaving every part that touches your mouth or your water open for a proper scrub.
That’s where the gunk tends to live. Cleaning guides routinely single out lid gaskets, spouts and straws as the hardest parts of a reusable bottle to keep hygienic, and a 2025 study of bottles used by medical students found coliform bacteria in nearly half of the samples tested.
Drinking is handled by what memobottle calls Sip360. The mouthpiece sits flat in the lid when not in use, then flips up for a sip. To close it, you spin it a full 360 degrees in either direction until it clicks, a handy bit of reassurance before it goes into your bag.
The body is double-walled 304 stainless steel, which memobottle says keeps drinks cold for 24 hours without any condensation, so it can safely sit next to a laptop. A bonded silicone base stops it clanging on hard surfaces, and each bottle ships with a color-matched clip-off carry strap.
The memo Round comes in two sizes: a 1-liter version for all-day hydration, and a 700-ml model that will fit a car cup holder. There are eight colorways, including Matte Black, Cloud Stone, Electric Blue, Black Cherry and Pink Salt.
The bottle is live on Kickstarter now with a modest US$10,000 funding goal, which it has already almost doubled at time of writing. Early-bird pledges start at $31 for a single 700-ml bottle, and $40 for the 1-liter. The planned RRPs are $34 and $44 respectively, and memobottle expects to start shipping rewards in November.
All crowdfunding campaigns carry an element of risk, but this is the company’s sixth crowdfunding campaign, and its first five raised more than $2 million between them, so there’s a decent track record to go on. memobottle is also a certified B Corp and a Water.org partner, funding five months of safe water for someone in need with every bottle sold.
The brand is clearly gunning for the biggest names in insulated drinkware, too, with Melbourne billboards telling locals to say goodbye to "Frank & Stanley." Others are rethinking lids in their own ways, like Dometic’s modular Drinkware system, but if that three-second teardown holds up to daily use, memobottle may have found a useful way to stand out in a very crowded market.
Source: Kickstarter
Note: New Atlas may earn commission from purchases made via links
