ElectraMet removes and recovers dissolved metals from industrial waste and recycling streams, helping customers to hit discharge compliance and purity standards while generating a value-added product.
ElectraMet provides metals removal and recovery solutions to industrial customers to create an innovative and disruptive solution for turning their facilities into sustainability leaders. The core technology, ElectraMet®, is an electrochemical reactor used to strategically recover metal from process water and wastewater streams. We work with industrial and recycling partners to create a circular economy where we turn wastewater into valuable (and critical) metal products while also ensuring facilities efficiently meet EPA compliance.
There are three main challenges and problems that we see in industrial process water and wastewater treatment that need better solutions:
- High cost and environmental footprint to remove metals, like copper, from process water and wastewater due to the complex nature of the stream
- Significant amount of valuable metals, like copper, go to waste by either being sent down the drain or ends up in landfill as a sludge
- Large labor requirements to operate complicated treatment equipment and processes and access to a decreasing workforce.
These challenges arise because industrial facilities are required to treat the water to meet NPDES permit limits. Secondary to EPA compliance is process disruptions. If the wastewater being produced can not be treated fast enough or if the process water gets out of specification, then the facility will have to slow down production, resulting in lost revenue opportunities. This is not an uncommon occurrence at US-based facilities such as semiconductor foundries.
The ElectraMet team is composed of both highly technical staff, capable of executing deployment of its electrochemical technology, as well as highly experienced staff, who have worked in multiple successful start-ups in the past. Both the CEO, Keith Jacobs, and the CFO, Cathy Conaty, are serial entrepreneurs with multiple successful exits. The CIO, Dr. Cameron Lippert, and the CTO, Dr. James Landon, have vast expertise in electrochemical and chemical separations processes and solution chemistry. The sales and marketing team led by the VP of Sales and Marketing, Mike Lewis, has decades of experience selling into the water treatment space. Finally, the VP of Operations, George Taylor, has led teams and divisions in the automotive space that are directly relevant to the manufacturing process needed to scale production of this electrochemical process.
Target Markets: We are initially targeting microelectronic manufacturing facilities and electric vehicle battery recyclers that use a hydrometallurgical process. We are targeting these sectors because:
- They are typically more sophisticated and like new technology
- They have a large influx of money and growth
- The water is “clean” containing essentially just acid, target metal(s), and salts
Little pre-treatment is needed as these waters do not contain FOGs, TOC, or elevated TSS. Recovery of the waste metal is currently rarely performed, which yields a large opportunity for disruption by our technology. As a process and wastewater treatment provider, today we sell direct to end users using an either fully hardware as a service (HaaS) model or splitting the capital and operating costs, providing flexibility. However, in the majority of cases, we do a capital expenditure sale on the skid, frame, control panel, and add a mandatory operating expenditure service contract which includes annual replacements of our ElectraMet® cartridges, general maintenance as needed, remote access/control, engineering support, and ElectraLink™, our data management system enabling support, operation, optimization, and issue resolution via a digital dashboard. Our pricing structure is a value-based process specific for each industry and customer based on their current solution as well as the next best alternative (NBA). We are actively working with partners to develop channels to sell through, including further sales channel support in southeast Asia and Europe, as two particularly important markets in the semiconductor and recycling markets.
Revenue is currently generated through a combination of capital and operating cost sales to end users in industrial markets. Both equipment purchase agreements (EPA) and monthly service agreements (MSA) contracts, typically 3 years in length, are signed by end users in the deployment of our ElectraMet solution. Additional revenue is also generated through certain strategic federal grant awards.
We are asking investors for strategic partnerships and opportunities in microelectronics and recycling markets to expand our offering further. Specifically, we are looking for additional contacts in southeast Asia (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea) to increase the adoption rate of this new separation process. Funding would be used to "seed the market" in deploying strategic pilots internationally in the semiconductor space as well as other microelectronics applications. An overseas office is being sought to decrease the sales time needed to deploy a commercial solution. Additional funding would be used to increase in-house manufacturing capabilities, lowering the lead time and refining the quality of sold units. Assembly technicians and strategic engineering staff relevant to this ramp-up in production are also needed.
ElectraMet has built upon 3 different innovations which come together to create the innovative and disruptive solution for turning industrial facilities into sustainability leaders.
ElectraMet®
ElectraMet® is an electrochemical filter that removes and recovers metals from water. It uses low cost, carbon-based electrodes and low power to actively attract, immobilize, and recover target metals with > 99% selectivity. These metals are recovered as high purity products either as metal sheets or powders and ready for processing by our partner network. ElectraMet® cartridges have been deployed to customer sites for >3 years, with each cartridge weighing less than 50 lbs and processing up to 10 gpm of water
ElectraLink™
ElectraLink is an assurance program that provides an additional layer of support by allowing ElectraMet engineers to monitor your system on your behalf in realtime. ElectraLink uses a secure cellular connection to run remote diagnostics, send daily system reports. With ElectraLink, historical trends and changes to the water treatment process can be tracked in real-time, including monitoring of alarm codes, tank levels, pressure drops, valve positions, pH, and ElectraMet® cartridge diagnostics, allowing active monitoring of process conditions. ElectraLink is currently operational at customer sites.
End-to-End Solutions
ElectraMet has an established network of partners that purchase and process the recovered metals into products creating a circular economy. Wieland is one such company. They are working to create a sustainable operation revolving around copper and copper alloys. This ensures a sustainable solution metals recovered from waste streams.
We have received angel capital, venture capital, state grants from the Cabinet for Economic Development in Kentucky and the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation, and federal grants from the Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
