Finnish startup ColloidTek has has raised a total funding of 2.8M€ led by the Danish VC-fund Scale Capital. The round was also joined by the existing investor Finnish VC-fund Maki.vc, private investors Thomas Kvorning and Niko Mokkila and existing angel investors.
ColloidTek’s mission is to change the way industries operate their liquid processes by helping companies optimize the use of raw materials, energy, and chemicals. Early adopters of Collo technology include for example ABB, Danone, Kemira, Metso Outotec, Evonik and Orion.
With ColloidTek’s liquid analytics platform, “Collo”, customers achieve considerable economic savings while combating global warming by optimizing the processes to use less and produce less waste. Manufacturing physical goods, such as a smartphone or a pair of jeans requires large amounts of liquids. When processes are optimized with real-time analysis, they use only the resources needed, having potential to save even up to 50% of the raw materials, energy, CO2 emissions or water.
Collo improves the performance of industrial liquid processes by helping the customer to make smarter decisions with up-to-date, easy-to-understand and real-time information of the process liquid. The Collo analyzer is installed directly into the process line, where it measures the process liquid continuously, bringing eyes inside the process. The Collo technology creates a real-time electromagnetic fingerprint of the measured liquid with high sensitivity to changes in the chemical composition or phases in the liquid. By accurately measuring the real-time state of the liquid, the companies can see exactly when a process step is ready or when the right amount of chemicals has been added, eliminating excess waste of resources.
The funding will enable ColloidTek to increase sales in Europe, build a foothold in the American market, and grow the Collo team with new talent.
“Our liquid performance platform offers not just arbitrary data, but actionable parameters for easier and more comprehensive process control”, says Matti Järveläinen, the CEO of ColloidTek. “We are developing our analytical system into an even easier-to-implement solution that improves the efficiency of any liquid process.”
“With technological development and increasing environmental concerns, solutions like Collo help companies to adapt to the inevitable change in the manufacturing industry”, says Lars Jensen from Scale Capital. “As the analyzer is applicable to nearly any liquid process, the company has large growth potential in the near future.”
Paavo Räisänen, investment director at Maki.vc has been working with the founders for more than 2 years. “During the past two years ColloidTek has demonstrated the value of their technology with multiple industrial giants and is now ready to bring real-time liquid analytics to new markets”, says Räisänen.
A concrete example of how Collo can benefit factories:
Beverage production requires large amounts of water in the cleaning process of the production lines. A single can of soda requires 124 liters of water to manufacture. The water requirements are overestimated in beverage production, especially in the cleaning process of the production lines between products. Optimizing the product switches and the cleaning process in beverage production with Collo can decrease the water consumption by 7%. If every beverage production line in the EU was optimized with Collo, the estimated savings in water consumption would be 25 million cubic meters (m3) a year – equivalent to the yearly water consumption of 460 000 UK citizens.
Physical goods require large amounts of liquids to manufacture, for example:
A can of coca cola takes 124 liters of water to manufacture.
A smartphone takes 1 000 liters of water to manufacture.
An electronic circuit board takes 4 000 liters of ultrapure water to manufacture.
A pair of jeans takes 5 000 liters to manufacture.
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