ZwitterCo Secures $5.9M Series Seed Financing Led by Mann+Hummel Corporate Ventures in collaboration with R-Cubed Capital Partners
With additional support by Burnt Island Ventures and individual angels
BOSTON, March 18, 2021 — ZwitterCo, a fouling-resistant membrane technologies provider, today 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.”
“Partnering with ZwitterCo demonstrates our commitment to support sustainable membrane innovations,” said Michael Adams, Director of Corporate Ventures at Mann+Hummel. “ZwitterCo’s new membrane technology will unlock new membrane applications that have been un-addressable with spiral elements until now, and significantly reduce the cost for customers in these application spaces.”
“The disruptive potential of ZwitterCo’s membrane technology, initially developed at Tufts University, has been evident since day one. Having advised the team along this early-stage path, it is gratifying to see the broader support and recognition of the impact on water that ZwitterCo can have,” said Stephen Remondi, Board Member and Managing Director of R-Cubed Capital Partners, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the School of Engineering and the Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts University. “ZwitterCo is solving a critical global challenge of reducing industrial and agricultural water consumption and containing environmentally damaging pollutants. This is a very significant early milestone for the company as it prepares to ramp up to full scale commercialization.”
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.
About ZwitterCo
ZwitterCo is a national industrial membrane provider, delivering patented filtration technologies that are durable and fouling resistant. The company recently closed a $5.9m fundraising round led by Mann+Hummel Corporate Ventures, and has been recognized by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center as a leader among clean water technologies. ZwitterCo’s cutting-edge membrane chemistry, paired with the company’s deep domain expertise, gives industrial processing facilities and their partners a pathway into the next generation of water treatment, precision separation, and resource recapture. For more information, visit https://www.localhost:10028/.