Singapore-based wastewater treatment startup Hydroleap has closed a SGD 2.6 million (USD 1.90 million) round of funding led by Wavemaker Partners.
The round’s other investors included Seeds Capital, and 500 Startups’ Southeast Asia focused 500 Durians fund. The company plans to use the cash on taking its proprietary technology to industrial parks as well as the mining, palm oil, and semiconductor industries. Its measures remove suspended solids, heavy metals, hardness and chemical oxygen demand—a measure of oxygen in a given solution—from wastewater.
Recently, the startup began to offer a chemical-free, cost-effective, and environmentally-friendly solution for wastewater treatment by replacing chemicals normally used in the process with electricity. It also provides end-to-end water treatment solutions at construction sites.
Hydroleap was founded by Mohammad Sherafatmand, who holds a PhD from the National University of Singapore in environmental engineering. He specializes in using electrochemical methods in the treatment of wastewater and contaminated soil.
“Through electrochemistry research, Dr. Moh has developed and commercialized an electrocoagulation system. In fact, competitors from the US and Europe lag behind in efficiency compared with Hydroleap’s inbuilt proprietary mechanism. Hydroleap’s beachhead market is in construction and enjoys a strong pipeline of projects,” Paul Santos, Wavemaker Partners managing partners, said in a statement. “We are proud to journey with Hydroleap to deploy 3,000 systems in Singapore alone. We firmly believe Hydroleap is an example of a defensible and sizable company from Southeast Asia.”
Before this round of funding, Hydroleap had received investments from SGInnovate, Sparklabs Cultiv8, Sparklabs Global Ventures, and Entrepreneur First.