Eight startup founders working on water problems pitched their companies in Traverse City on Thursday, and the organization that helped bring them here is trying to persuade them to stay.
The founders presented at a showcase at the Delamar Traverse City for the blue tech accelerator run by 20Fathoms and gener8tor.
Stacey Feeley, executive director of 20Fathoms, told the crowd her organization has put together a relocation package for founders who build their companies in the region.
“We want our founders to grow. We really want them to grow here,” Feeley said.
The package includes follow-on support from the 20Fathoms team, potential funding from the 20Fathoms Innovation Fund and from Northern Michigan Angels, a housing stipend from a real estate company, support from Traverse Connect, and expertise and a talent pipeline from the Great Lakes Water Studies Institute, Feeley said.
“It takes a community effort to bring these founders in,” she said.
Susan Springsteen, CEO and co-founder of H2O Connected, makes a device that goes inside a toilet tank and detects the ways toilets waste water, from leaking flappers to faulty fill valves.
“A running toilet where the chain hangs up can waste five gallons per minute. That’s over 7,000 gallons a day,” Springsteen said. “Even a small leak you can’t see or hear can be wasting 50 to 250 gallons per day.”
Springsteen told the crowd the company monitors 2,300 toilets. She said it focuses on hotels and affordable housing, where a running toilet in an empty room can go unnoticed for days.
Jonathan Weyhrauch said Capture Tech deploys natural materials into the water to take up excess nutrients and contaminants while building native biodiversity.
The company turns what it captures into fertilizers, soil amendments and bioremediation tools, he said, “because there’s no such thing as waste in a healthy environment and something eats everything.”
Weyhrauch said he has been through “many, many accelerators” and called this one “probably one of the best ones.”
Eamonn Powers founded Thalweg after analyzing a large hydroacoustic data set for his master’s project at Grand Valley State University.
“I found that the current software tools weren’t necessarily meeting the needs for finding the needle in a haystack of a lake sturgeon within this larger fish community,” Powers said.
Powers said he incorporated the company in August before joining the accelerator this fall. He said he is working on conversations with FishPass.
“As someone who works in fisheries and has worked in fisheries for my entire career, it’s wonderful to be up in this area with so much exciting tech and so much exciting research going on in the Great Lakes,” he said.
Suhan Park, co-founder and CEO of Ann Arbor-based Oprones, said the company is building drones that move through tunnels on their own, without GPS, cell service or a pilot.
Park said crews are now sent into hazardous tunnels to inspect them by hand, and the company is targeting storm sewers, rail, oil and gas, and construction.
Oprones plans to finish its first working product by the end of the year, he said, and its “immediate goal is locking in our pilots in early next year.”
Mahesh Murugesan, CEO of Effluent, said the mentors in the program have been “very helpful, especially since they’re water leaders.”
Effluent makes software for water and wastewater treatment plants. Murugesan said that after he moved his focus from California to the East Coast, the company started working with 14 utilities.
“Typically, you see a lot of slow moving in the water industry at the moment, but I think Traverse City is being very proactive with what’s happening,” he said.
Murugesan said he will be based in North Carolina for the next few months while the company works through its pilots, then plans to move to New York. He said he expects to spend more time in Traverse City.
“I think it’s very cool out here,” he said.
AmHyTech, based in Detroit, is developing a way to store and move ammonia as a liquid at room temperature and low pressure.
CEO Morteza Sarp said at the showcase that the company hopes to make ammonia more accessible to northern Michigan farmers and to help bring an ammonia-powered tugboat to the Great Lakes.
“Traverse City has a very unique advantage amongst anywhere else in the state,” Feeley said. “And that advantage is so incredibly important for these startups.”
Part of that advantage, Feeley said, is a network of industry experts and operators who choose to live in the region, people a founder might run into at a coffee shop.
“We have a sticker at work that says, I get to live here,” Feeley said. “And it’s like my favorite sticker. And that’s the real thing.”
The rest is the water.
“We are sitting on over 20% of the world’s surface fresh water,” Feeley said. Founders “get to do their research and prove their innovation here on the shores of the very water trying to protect,” she said.
Springsteen said 20Fathoms gives founders a place to work alongside people facing the same problems.
“For water entrepreneurs like me, you have 20Fathoms, which is an ideal support and workspace where you can start an early stage company and be surrounded by people who are trying to do similar things and are going through the same types of challenges that you are,” she said.
“The startup culture in Traverse City has been wonderful, and especially the blue tech culture in Traverse City,” Powers said.
Weyhrauch said the public here already understands what’s at stake for the lakes, which makes his company’s work easier to explain.
“One of the big things that we love about northern Michigan is the people here are aware of the issue with the lakes,” he said.
Murugesan said he would “definitely recommend everyone in the water tech to come out to Traverse City.”
Whether the founders stay is still an open question.
Springsteen said setting up in Traverse City depends on building her client base, because it “has to make <a href="https://bitcomme.com/triumph-financial-q3-earnings-call-highlights/” title=”Triumph Financial Q3 Earnings Call Highlights”>financial sense for me and my investors.”
“But I do think there’s a great opportunity here in Traverse City,” she said. “And I now have friends here. They’re very encouraging. They want to see me succeed. And so I would love to have a footprint here.”
