UV-C LED Disinfection Solutions Company AquiSense Closes Series A Investment – CleanTechnica

---

---

The UV-C LED disinfection systems provider AquiSense recently announced it has secured a Series A investment led by Burnt Island Ventures. Aquisense products are used to disinfect water, surfaces, and air.

Water systems sometimes contain harmful microbes that need to be removed to protect human health. In the US alone, waterborne diseases affect over 7 million people each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Globally, several million people die each year from waterborne diseases.  

AquiSense CEO and founder Oliver Lawal answered some questions about the company, its products, and the investment.

What products does your company make, and what do they do? 

AquiSense, Inc. is the world’s leading supplier of UV-C LED solutions for water, surface, and air disinfection. For water disinfection, PearlAqua product offerings span the full spectrum of solutions. PearlAqua Micro includes a range of small-scale systems for point-of-dispense and point-of-use applications. PearlAqua Deca is designed for point of use applications with higher flow rates such as showers and beverage machines, or smaller point of entry applications including RVs, boats, apartments, or homes. PearlAqua Kilo and Tera, accommodate industrial and municipal water treatment needs. 

The PearlLab Beam is a compact Collimated Beam Device which allows accurate benchscale calibration of UV technology.  

The PearlLab ThinFilm™ is a flow-through system specifically designed for low ultraviolet transmittance (UVT) applications. It is ideal for testing fluids with low UVT or applications requiring very high UV doses. 

The PearlAero™ is a UVC-LED solution for disinfecting air. There are many applications for air treatment systems ranging from cleaning the air in busy factories, labs, hospitals, and homes to removing odors in public restrooms. 

What benefits do they provide? 

UV disinfection technology has become an indispensable tool in global water quality management. The shortcomings of the technology have traditionally been outweighed by the benefits. However, tangible mid-and long-term risks exist with its reliance on Mercury, a banned heavy metal and neurotoxin.  UV-C LEDs offer a viable alternative that is able to achieve the same ultimate treatment goals, but with more flexibility and increasingly more efficiency.    

AquiSense solutions demonstrate exceptional durability, robust & compact design, system efficiency, extended lifespan enabled by smart operation, advanced system monitoring and control features, customizable solutions, collaboration with end users, straightforward automation, and simple operation and maintenance. Some products can be enabled with self-cleaning to reduce maintenance and operation costs. Products are designed to have extended life for lamp usage with some products having 5-year lamp replacement intervals.  

For the industrial and municipal, large scale systems, clear benefits are the simple operation and maintenance and mercury and chemical free systems. UVC-LED eliminates UV mercury requirements for emergency catch containment filtration systems, expensive mercury lamp storage and disposal. Targeted UV-C light without high temperatures minimizes effluence that fouls traditional mercury lamp systems.

Eliminates the labor and time to inspect and clean sleeves. Robust design in a small, self-contained unit takes up less footprint and can easily be integrated into existing structures. All replacement parts are designed to be isolated from the reaction chamber while still pressurized. Operators simply remove a few external fixtures to remove the lamp assembly and reattach a new lamp module. All electronic lamp drivers are housed in the same assembly, negating the need for an additional ballast cabinet and interconnecting cabling. 

This significantly reduces the system footprint, installation complexity and cost. Replaceable LED lamp with a stable UV-C output power and advanced cooling optimizes consistency and lifetime of the unit. Finally, units can be equipped with remote I/O interface for advanced analytics, and real-time UV intensity monitoring provides data on the systems’ performance.   

Who are your customers? 

AquiSense operates primarily as a B2B company supplying OEMs and distributors within residential, commercial and industrial medical markets – think beverage dispensers, gray water reuse, dialysis machines, etc. We also have a leading position in municipal applications, with new installations in Norway, UK, Canada, USA, Japan and Spain. We also handle high value custom projects in Aerospace (NASA, ESA), pharmaceuticals and energy sectors.

What is the product cost? 

Product cost varies by product type, flow rate, and scope of project from hundreds to millions of dollars. Anyone interested in UVC-LED solutions for home use can purchase residential units from around $300 to $1,500. Larger installations can total over $2M and so overall we have a huge range in cost. Overall, our customers see a strong return of investment due to lower overall operational costs from longer lamp replacement intervals. 

Your technology can treat water, surfaces, and air. How does it work with air? 

Air treatment is the process of using a UV-C LED to disinfect, reduce, and even destroy harmful pathogens and bacteria in the air. Airborne diseases and bacteria can wreak havoc on delicate systems or sterile environments. At AquiSense, we have developed the PearlAero™ using UV-C LEDs to treat air and destroy harmful bacteria that might be present. Air treatment works by exposing the air to UV-C LEDs that have been collaborated to a specific wavelength that is powerful enough to destroy any contaminates. By introducing a filter, or filters, to an air treatment device, it increases the effectiveness of the system and the quality of the air passing through the device. Application examples include: 

• Small confined rooms 
• Recirculating air-flow 
• Small research rooms 
• Food & beverage process rooms 
• Humidifiers 
• Odor control on fume hood 

What makes UV-C LEDs environmentally friendly? 

• Mercury free operation eliminates mercury handling, storage, and disposal. 
• Chemical free operation eliminates or reduces chemical needs. 
• Eliminates UV mercury requirements for emergency catch containment filtration systems, expensive mercury lamp storage, and disposal.  
• On demand use drastically reduces energy consumption. 

UV-C light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in water treatment are demonstrating all the benefits of conventional mercury-based gas discharge lamps without many of the drawbacks; long warm-up time, on/off cycling limitations, buildup of effluent causing fouling, heavy metal contamination risk and responsible disposal of lamps containing a potent toxin that’s dangerous to both people and the environment.  

UV-C LEDs are a mercury- and chemical-free alternative for UV disinfection systems that provide future proof, Minamata Convention compliant, sustainable solutions.  They offer a flexible, durable, and eco-friendly source of pathogen-destroying UV-C photons. (Christian J Zollner et al., Germicidal ultraviolet LEDs: a review of applications and semiconductor technologies. 2021 Semicond. Sci. Technol. 36 123001) 

UVC-LED reduces waste and increases sustainability. For example, in a typical point-of-entry residential application, AquiSense Deca LED lamp replacement occurs every 5 years. Not only does the system consume around 20% of the power of a conventional UV system daily, but it also offers users around 75% lower cost of replacement parts over a 5-year period. Additional savings in lamp manufacturing, shipping, and disposal are all in addition. In addition, this mercury and chemical free solution provides a Minamata compliant product that disinfects water without toxic risks to the environment or users. 

What will you use your Series A investment for? 

We already have a very strong product portfolio and advanced US-based manufacturing facility, so the bulk of the funding will be applied to growing our market presence in sales channels and marketing.  
 
What research does your company conduct? 

AquiSense designs its disinfection products around five pillars that make a robust UV-C LED disinfection device- structural, electronic, microbiological, fluid and optical. We have a world class UV LED testing facility that is able to predict, with a high level of accuracy, how they perform under real-world conditions. This is particularly important when dealing with multiple suppliers that are constantly updating their product offerings. It’s critical that we stay with best-in-class LEDs in our products. 

 AquiSense works with universities, non-profits and other agencies to pilot test, certify, and validate products. They also have several patents on file and are creating new products and value-added features to improve efficiency and efficacy.