By Abbi Fischer
For WisBusiness.com
Even before Haiti’s infrastructure was torn apart by a high magnitude earthquake in 2010, clean water was scarce, expensive and hard to find. Chemicals and bacteria in much of Haiti’s water turned it from a life-giving resource to a potentially life-threatening one by spreading disease.
Unfortunately, Haiti is not the only nation plagued by the poor state of its drinking water. Similar conditions affect millions of people daily. Todd Asmuth, president and CEO of AquaMost Labs, believes his company has a solution.
AquaMost Labs, a company founded by UW-Madison researchers in 2006, has created a low-energy, chemical-free water purification system that effectively removes disease-causing bacteria, chemical pollutants and even gasoline from drinking water.
“It’s more efficient, requires no chemicals, and, most important, it’s environmentally friendly,” Asmuth said.
While AquaMost does work with non-profit ventures, Asmuth said the company is currently targeting the shale gas fracking market and point-of-use drinking water purification.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, combines deep-hole drilling, horizontal drilling and pumping in a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals to open cracks in shale rock deposits so that natural gas can escape, Asmuth said.
This process is allowing the United States to collect large quantities of domestic natural gas at very low prices.
“It is changing the energy production, price and security of the country,” Asmuth said.
However, this release of natural gas uses huge quantities of water, which become polluted with bacteria, chemicals and salt as a result of the process, Asmuth continued.
Making this low-cost domestic energy source environmentally safe is one of the challenges AquaMost hopes to solve.
Asmuth noted that water has enough complexity that no single product can clean it under every circumstance. However, the AquaMost technology effectively and efficiently removes chemicals and bacteria from water without adding more chemicals and cost into the equation.
AquaMost Labs is completing a follow-on investing round based on the company’s $8 million valuation, Asmuth said. It is being led by the Golden Angels Network and Wisconsin Investment Partners, two early investors. The company announced a $1 million financing round in early 2011.
The company also recently received a $986,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Over time, Asmuth said, the company plans to use debt or debt capital to fund itself and its growth. More products, more markets, and more work in the non-profit arena are part of the company’s “foreseeable future,” Asmuth said.
“I think the future is bright,” he said.
Challenges for AquaMost come from a combination of inaction and existing technologies, according to Asmuth. Companies have the option of not treating their water, treating it chemically, or treating the polluted water with chemical reactions.
Asmuth said that these options are not real competition for AquaMost because they are expensive and have their own environmental consequences.
A non-descript blue box, roughly the size of a refrigerator, has the power to change the way the world cleans its water and AquaMost’s Asmuth believes it will.
“We want to change the way water is cleaned in the world,” Asmuth said. “Clean water without chemicals that’s also cost efficient? That is where we see the future.”
— Fischer is a student in the UW-Madison Department of Life Sciences Communication.
