Milwaukee Water Council unveils new round of water-tech start-ups for business incubator program

The Milwaukee-based Water Council on Friday announced the latest round of water-technology startups chosen to participate in its accelerator program as part of its effort to establish the city as a global hub of water-tech innovation.

“Milwaukee, a city that brewed beer for decades, is internationally recognized for brewing water-technology innovations to help solve our world’s water challenges,” said Dean Amhaus, chief executive of the Water Council.

The decade-old Water Council acts as a trade group that brings together the metro region’s large and established water engineering companies and encourages university-driven water research and grants. It began as a Milwaukee-centric economic development program but evolved into an internationally active organization.

One of its main challenges, however, has been the conspicuous absence of a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs who can generate investment and growth in the water-driven economy beyond such local champions as Aqua-Chem (which dates to 1929), Badger Meter Inc. (1905) and A.O. Smith Corp. (1904).

Five years ago, the Council launched its BREW business incubator program, selecting startup applicants based on their potential to develop and commercialize technologies that monitor or treat water.

RELATED:Water Council's BREW program promises to launch 75 startups

Each year, BREW winners receive up to a $50,000 equity investment; work space and labs in the Global Water Center facility in Milwaukee; business training through the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Institute for Water Business; and connections with the network of existing water-engineering companies and universities.

Judges selected these startups for the fifth annual accelerator program:

• Ecoli-Sense from Ontario, Canada, creates biosensor technology for a monitoring platform for water quality and agriculture, including a prototype of a magnetic bio-ink E. coli detection system.
• Pulsed Burst Systems LLC of Richfield,  patented a process that optimizes wastewater treatment with what it calls an improved way to run low-pressure bubbles through water as part of the cleaning process.
• Hydrate Gel Filtration from Brisbane, Australia, is developing an ultra-filtration technology using a gelatinous layer of aluminum hydroxide hydrate that enables simple, high-rate and cost-effective production of filtered water.
• Water Resources Monitoring Group of Lancaster addresses deficiencies in current agriculture water run-off monitoring programs. WRM created an agricultural hydrology monitoring program that provides low-cost, high-quality data that aids accurate decision making to help increase farm profits and improve water quality.
• Plasma Environmental of Milwaukee has developed a process to clean water that works on the molecular level by activating ions.