Water Council unveils new startups 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.

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.

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.

Each year, BREW winners receive up to a $50,000 equity investment; work space and labs in the Global Water Center facility in Milwaukee and business training through the University of WisconsinWhitewater Institute for Water Business.

Judges selected these startups:

Ecoli-Sense of Ontario, Canada, creates biosensor technology for a monitoring platform for water quality and agriculture, including a prototype of a magnetic bioink E. coli detection system.

Pulsed Burst Systems of Richfield, patented a process that optimizes wastewater treatment with what it calls an improved way to run lowpressure bubbles through water as part of the cleaning process.

Hydrate Gel Filtration from Brisbane, Australia, is developing an ultra-filtration technology that enables costeffective production of filtered water.

Water Resources Monitoring Group of Lancaster addresses deficiencies in current agriculture water runoff monitoring programs. WRM created an agricultural hydrology monitoring program that provides low-cost, high-quality data that aids accurate decision-making to improve water quality.

Plasma Environmental of Milwaukee has developed a process to clean water that works on the molecular level by activating ions.