ZwitterCo, a fouling-resistant membrane technologies provider, recently announced that it has closed its Series Seed financing of $5.9 million to scale its water treatment and advanced separations solutions. The funding round was led by global filtration and separations technologies leader Mann+Hummel Corporate Ventures in collaboration with R-Cubed Capital Partners, and with additional support from Burnt Island Ventures and individual investors.
ZwitterCo provides hydrophilic membranes that can filter historically un-filterable process water and wastewater that is rich with fats, oils, proteins and other hard-to-remove organic compounds. The company is targeting applications in bioprocessing, agricultural waste treatment, food and beverage, and other industries where standard membrane solutions foul and quickly degrade in performance. With the new funding, the company will complete final field testing in several key markets, expand commercial production, and continue to support its growing list of customers and channel partners.
“There are clear and urgent challenges in water that ZwitterCo’s solutions can address, including opportunities to expand reuse, solve production bottlenecks, ensure discharge compliance, convert waste streams into valuable products and more,” said Alex Rappaport, CEO. “We are humbled that our membranes are providing tangible solutions to these challenges. Our work with Mann+Hummel and our other partners has been critical for scaling quickly and getting our products into these industrial applications.”
Since its founding in 2018, after being spun out of Tufts University, ZwitterCo has received recognition and funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the National Science Foundation and others. The company is also an alumnus of the Imagine H2O accelerator program and the Greentown Labs incubator. ZwitterCo is actively demonstrating its technology in seven processing plants across North America while it is preparing to scale operations to support full commercial deployments.
