This water treatment startup is already a unicorn, and has $225 million in VC funding

 

While it might seem like humans and animals consume most of the world’s water, heavy industry uses up to half of it. That’s why business sectors are looking for new ways to recycle water, especially in the face of increased drought.

Some of the world’s most essential industries, like pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, textiles, mining, renewables and power all use huge amounts of water. Now, new companies are finding ways to reclaim and recycle water as inexpensively as possible.

The global water and wastewater treatment market is expected to reach half a trillion dollars by the end of this decade, according to Statista. Much of it now involves harsh chemicals and uses a lot of energy, but companies like Xylem, Veolia and Boston-based startup Gradiant are trying to reduce both costs and energy while eliminating chemicals.

“We take highly contaminated wastewater which contains solvents, which contains dissolved salt, which contains organics, and we eliminate the entire liquid waste,” said Prakash Govindan, co-founder and chief technology officer at Gradiant.

Anurag Bajpayee and Govindan founded Gradiant in 2013 as a spinout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Gradiant’s technology mimics how nature creates rain. Wastewater is heated and pumped into a humidifier and mixed with ambient air. As the two interact, they are heated into vapor, leaving the contaminants behind. Using a proprietary technology, the vapor is transferred to a column with cool clean water. When the two mix, the air cools and drops fresh water, like rain falls from a cloud. The process, according to Gradiant, cuts traditional costs in half.

“Other technologies can recover maybe 50 to 60% of water, but we can recover 99% of water,” Govindan said.

Gradiant is the first water purification unicorn. Its client roster is impressive, working with companies that include Coca-Cola, BMW, Pfizer and Adnoc. It claims to save 1.7 billion gallons of water daily, or the amount consumed by 48 million people. It closed over $500 million in new orders in the first half of this year, according to the company, making its growth trajectory attractive to investors.

“Scaling these technologies is difficult. It’s easy to find a product, but it’s it’s much more difficult to find a full end-to-end solution for customers, and that’s what Gradiant has done,” said Mark Danchak, co-founder at General Innovation Capital Partners, a Gradiant investor.

Gradiant is also backed by Warburg Pincus, M&G Investments, Formation 8, Clearvision Ventures and GRC. It has raised $228 million to date.

 

How one climate startup aims to use AI to protect the power grid

• As fires intensify in the western U.S., utility companies are on the front lines to protect power lines, and AI is a big part of the process.
• The U.S. has roughly 5.5 million miles of power lines on more than a quarter billion poles surrounded by even more trees, and keeping a human eye on all of it is impossible.
• Companies such as Pano AI, Satelytics and California-based AiDash are tapping high tech to lower risk.

As fires intensify in the western U.S., utility companies are on the front lines, working to protect the power lines that serve millions of customers. As the frequency of fires and severe storms increases, so does the amount of technology that utility companies use to keep things running.

The U.S. has roughly 5.5 million miles of power lines on more than a quarter billion poles surrounded by even more trees, and keeping a human eye on all of it is impossible.

That’s why artificial intelligence is taking the lead.

Enter new software companies such as Pano AI, Satelytics and California-based AiDash, which are tapping high tech to lower risk.

“Using satellites, we can monitor each and every tree, each and every pole, as frequently as we want, identify the challenges and fix them before they cause an accident,” Abhishek Singh, CEO and co-founder of AiDash, told CNBC.

Utility companies are often required by local governments to scan 100% of their lines and address any issues before fire season.

“This entire exercise of maintaining trees along power lines is a $10 billion annual spend in the U.S. alone,” Singh added. “With the labor cost increasing, and shortage of labor, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the problems without technology.”

AiDash uses its tech to not only identify current issues, but also potential future ones, integrating weather data with detailed vegetation data to gauge risk levels throughout the fire season and address them. The company does the same for extreme wind and precipitation events.

National Grid, which services customers in much of the northeast, is both a client of and investor in AiDash through its venture capital arm, National Grid Partners.

“The most important thing for us is the grid reliability,” Andre Turenne, vice president of investments at National Grid Partners, told CNBC, adding that the company has seen a 30% reduction in outages and a 55% reduction in the duration of outages since using AiDash.

“Their differentiator was they built an end-to-end platform, a workflow platform designed for utility engineers to actually deploy and do predictive analytics, deploy the crews on the ground and generally provide a platform for our engineers to use end-to-end,” said Turenne.  

In addition to National Grid Partners, AiDash is backed by Duke Energy, Edison International, Shell Ventures, Lightrock and SE Ventures. Its total venture capital funding so far is $91.5 million.

As part of the green transition, and as more industries make the switch to all-electric power, grid capacity and reliability will become even more vital. Over the next five years, National Grid said it plans to spend $75 billion in its jurisdictions in the U.K., as well as in New York and Massachusetts, to upgrade for both.