Author: HG Ventures

When FREDsense Technologies CEO David Lloyd visited The Heritage Group for the Industrial Water Forum recently, HG Ventures Managing Director Ginger Rothrock sat down with him to discuss why real-time PFAS detection is a critical piece of the contamination puzzle, how a ten-year-old company found new focus, and what it takes to build at the intersection of risk, liability, and industrial-scale. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What FREDsense does

Ginger Rothrock (GR): David, tell me a little bit about FREDsense.

David Lloyd (DL): FREDsense is a water instrumentation company. We build portable field kits for a class of chemicals called PFAS, also called ‘forever chemicals’. These are things that maybe you think about in pots and pans, but they’re actually a huge issue across all sorts of areas of the water industry — whether it’s cleaning things up from a landfill or looking at industrial discharge, or even getting it out of drinking water. We need better ways to be able to detect it, monitor it, and right now we can’t do that in real time. And that’s what we’re here to change.

GR: You first came to The Center, [headquarters of The Heritage Group and HG Ventures,] over a year ago. How was that experience for you?

DL: Coming to the center was a really unique experience. Meeting with all of the different companies that are doing real work, whether it’s in hazardous waste or industrial applications, and just seeing the collective groups and how they can work together to really accelerate technology, solve problems… it was incredibly valuable for us.

I’m a chemist — an analytical chemist at heart — so getting to talk to some of the technical experts here and really dive into what we do in the analytical space was just a great conversation. Getting to see the resources, how we might be able to work together, and then taking that all the way into a commercial application space — looking at different types of problems on the hazardous waste material side, seeing the opportunities. It felt like a full-lifecycle type of conversation: you can go from early tech all the way out to what’s going on in the market.

Finding the right focus

GR: You didn’t start out doing PFAS. FREDsense has been around for over ten years; what made you think PFAS was the way to go?

DL: One of the interesting things about being a water technology company is the ability to look around at different market applications and see what fits — where the technology fit is strongest. FREDsense has always been a technology platform; we can build sensors on our system for a variety of different types of contaminants. It really got to the point for us where we were looking at what types of markets really fit with our style of technology and also had that application across sectors. And it was hard to ignore PFAS — there were just so many different applications for where the technology could fit. We felt like we had a unique technology that could enter the market in a way that made a lot of sense for us. So with that kind of fit, it was just hard to ignore.

What customers actually need

GR: We’ve made a number of investments in the PFAS sector — we’re managing PFAS waste all over the place. We’ve invested in other companies doing capture and destruction, but many groups don’t know when and where they have PFAS; so the fact that there’s a kit you can literally put in your car, drive out to a site, and get real-time analysis, is really exciting. What else are your customers asking for?

DL: One of the biggest challenges with PFAS is that it’s so hard to figure out where it could and couldn’t be, so we have a lot of conversations around screening of sites — just finding where it is and getting that real-time insight to decide: what am I going to do with it? How can I treat it? How can I get it out of the system?

The other piece is foresight into regulatory and liability burdens. Ultimately we need to drive this industry faster — and analytics allows us to do that. Whether it’s process optimization, control, or helping treatment providers get to market faster and develop more, that’s a huge part of what the industry needs to move forward.

HG Ventures’ PFAS journey

DL: Let me ask you, Ginger, why was PFAS such a focus for you? Can you talk about that journey and how you thought about bringing in different companies to solve this challenge?

GR: At The Heritage Group, we’ve handled hazardous waste for a really long time. Back close to when the venture group got started — around 2018 or 2019 — we were hearing from our operating companies that they were managing more and more of this thing called PFAS. We went and looked across the world and honestly only found one startup working in this space. That was Puraffinity — they were a spin-out of a lab. So we made that investment early on.

But we knew there was more technology development to be done with PFAS — not just “let’s put it on a truck and send it to an incinerator to get rid of it.” We’ve really been interested in those next-generation technologies.

In the beginning it was about capturing and destroying PFAS, but now that we know there’s PFAS everywhere — it’s in you, it’s in me, it’s in groundwater, it’s in various industrial sites — how do we know when and where it is so we can focus the treatment? That’s what made us very excited about what you guys are doing, and what that added to the technology landscape of PFAS.

Risk, liability, and the human dimension

DL: It sounds like it’s not just technology — it’s also about being a market leader. Where do you see things going as you make these investments and the markets start to expand?

GR: PFAS is a hard one. When you talk to anybody in the investing world, they say it’s all driven by regulation, all driven by the government. I don’t see it that way. You see it driven more by fear and liability in the industrial sector. You’ve got a number of different companies — obviously all over the news — that have had to pay billions of dollars to remediate their PFAS problems. So for us, it’s not necessarily a regulatory problem; it’s a risk reduction and resiliency issue. We want to make sure that industrial customers we know, all over the world, can handle this more robustly.

DL: Whether it’s sensors, treatment, or service — all of this coming together to meet that liability head on is the key thing the industry is moving towards.

GR: I agree. And then you have the human health component. These are technology solutions that benefit The Heritage Group, other waste managers, other industrial customers, but at the end of the day, it’s also about ensuring everyone’s health is as strong as possible. PFAS is definitely a chemical of interest and concern, and all the work we’re doing in this space is also aiming to help the human condition.

Building where the competition is the status quo

GR: When you’re working at this intersection of climate and regulation and industrial scale, you really need patience, because you don’t have control over everything that’s happening in your environment. How do you think about development cycles, and selling to your customers, and what drives that?

DL: When we see that nexus of new markets emerging, like PFAS — new regulatory problems that we know we’re going to have to meet — it really comes down to finding customers who are looking for partners who see where we’re going and what we need from a technology perspective.

Bringing different stakeholders together to really meet that need takes time, it takes development, and a real ability to co-create the future we want to have. PFAS is a great example of a market where we see that actively happening, and happening quickly compared to other spaces.

GR: The water industry, more than any other, requires an ecosystem. It’s not just a sensor technology — as impactful as that is. It’s also: what do you do with the data after you have it? How do you solve that particular problem? Which partners do you bring in? That’s a great part of this industry, and it requires everyone.

DL: Yes, it’s not just a technology challenge — it’s a regulatory challenge, it’s a willingness challenge, it’s all of us working together as that ecosystem to really overcome this.

We have systemic challenges: old systems that need to be digitized and modernized. We have new technology opportunities. Working together with communities to make real change takes everyone involved.

GR: It’s an interesting place when your competition is the status quo.

DL: And sometimes that’s the most difficult competitor to overcome. That’s why it really takes leadership — like what HG Ventures is doing — to foster new technologies into the market and overcome some of those challenges.

GR: With HG Ventures, we get the opportunity to partner with startups like FREDsense and bring all of The Heritage Group’s assets and expertise to bear in helping you succeed.

DL: And that’s massive for a company like us. We’re looking for what’s going to advance our technology, our market learnings, our ability to solve problems — and to work collaboratively to get there. That’s why we value this partnership so much.

Founded in Calgary, FREDsense Technologies develops portable, field-deployable detection technology for PFAS and other contaminants in water. HG Ventures is an investor in FREDsense and continues to support the company through its research group and the broader Heritage Group network. We are proud to partner with David and the FREDsense team as they bring real-time PFAS monitoring to an industry that urgently needs it.

Watch the full interview here:

 

When Puraffinity CEO, Vincent Caillaud visited HG Ventures to attend the Industrial Water Forum, John Glushik took the opportunity to sit down with him to discuss the PFAS contamination challenge, what makes Puraffinity’s technology different, the realities of selling innovation into a conservative water industry, and his advice for founders building at the intersection of climate, regulation, and infrastructure. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How PFAS became a global challenge

John Glushik (JG): Vincent, when you talk to someone outside the water industry, how do you explain why PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) is such a big issue?

Vincent Caillaud (VC): Before it became such a big issue, there were great chemicals, very useful for their resistance to water, their resistance to abrasion, their resistance to temperature. And they became so useful in our day-to-day life, in our clothes, in our kitchen, but also in industry – and big example is firefighting foams. But because they are so resistant, their main advantage became their main problem. Because they are so resistant, they don’t degrade, they never degrade and hence the words “forever chemicals”.

That’s the whole PFAS story.

And removing PFAS from water is pertinent because water is the main path to human consumption.

A specific solution to a specific problem

JG: PFAS isn’t a new issue. The industry has been working on it for years. What is it about Puraffinity that made you decide to lead the company?

VC: Until now, PFAS has largely been addressed with generic technologies — the same ones the water industry has used for decades to remove all kinds of contaminants. Those technologies do remove PFAS to some extent. It’s such a challenge for the water industry that it deserves a specific technology and one of the most important things about Puraffinity is that Puraffinity has developed, and continues to improve, that specific technology, targeted on PFAS compounds. And that creates a completely different efficiency in terms of removing PFAS from water.

Beyond the performance differentiation, that targeting unlocks much more compact systems, easier standardization and modularization, and the ability to deploy mobile units that move from site to site. The differentiation isn’t only in what the media does, it is in what the media lets the rest of the system become.

JG: Tell us a little more about what is happening scientifically inside the media, the material that the water passes through.

VC: The expertise of Puraffinity is not only on the media, or on one media, the real expertise of Puraffinity is in our capacity to bundle different substrates with different polymers, or different families of polymer, to make products—call it a media—that are exceptionally efficient at targeting PFAS compounds. The work began more than a decade ago in the labs of Imperial College London, and we continue to evolve the polymers, test new substrates, and push the efficiency higher.

Different PFAS compounds don’t react the same way to the same polymer. So, we’re not building one product. We’re building a portfolio of products that we can mix differently depending on the specific water matrix.

Earning trust in a conservative industry

JG: It sounds like a straightforward sale, but as you say, the water industry tends to move slowly. How do you help customers move faster?

VC: I work on my own patience first. I started my career as a project manager in this industry, and project managers want to kill risks. One of the obvious ways to kill risks is to do what you have always done.

There is a kind of resistance to innovation in the water industry. There’s an adversity to risk, which is a good thing, in particular when you’re dealing with potable water, but sometimes these risk-averse habits, become innovation-averse behaviors. We try to fight against that. We fight against that by proving.

We also try to make adoption as easy as possible. We’ve leaned into service-based delivery models, where we rent rather than sell our assets, so the perceived risk for the customer is lower. And in some cases, where the water matrix is known and stable enough, we will guarantee the quantity of media required to treat a given flow. That’s not the habit of the PFAS industry, and it removes another layer of perceived risk — on top of the obvious gain that we are simply more efficient and more affordable.

JG: What has surprised you most in your first chapter at Puraffinity?

VC: A few things have surprised us along the way. The negative surprise is how slow this business [the water industry] can be. The positive surprise is how much and how fast we are able to improve our products and our polymers, and that gives us a lot of ambition and optimism for what comes next.

A third surprise has been on the customer side. PFAS is a regulatory challenge, but because of the inefficiency of the incumbent technology, it is also an operational challenge — a daily headache for the operators who run the system. We’ve found that our best allies inside a customer’s plant are very often those operators. When we come through the door with something simpler and more compact, they become our friends.

Becoming the reference name in PFAS

JG: Where do you see Puraffinity in five or ten years?

VC: You want to become a leader. Success is becoming a leader in a niche. It doesn’t need to be a massive niche, or global niche — but you need to be very good somewhere, you need to be recognized as a leader somewhere. So, we want to be recognized for PFAS removal from water. That’s the only thing; we want to become a reference, we want to become a company, a name people have in mind and that people would call when they have a PFAS challenge or they see an evolution in their PFAS challenge.

Once you have that leadership position, then you go beyond. PFAS removal in itself is not efficient. You need to associate the PFAS removal with detection at the front end and destruction at the back end. The full PFAS loop must be controlled, not simply moved around. We don’t have to do all of that ourselves — partnerships will matter. We first need to be a leader here; the rest will follow from that.

The HG Ventures partnership

VC: Let me turn the question around, John. PFAS is a crowded space at the moment. Why did HG Ventures choose Puraffinity?

JG: We had been tracking PFAS for some time, and we have two real advantages at HG Ventures: a research group inside the Heritage Group that can validate the underlying chemistry, and operating companies that come across these problems in the field every day. We knew we wanted to invest in a technology that had real validation and was very specifically focused on this problem.

And while Puraffinity is based in London — farther afield than our typical portfolio — the conviction was strong enough that geography wasn’t going to be the deciding factor.

We’re always looking for ways to really add value, tangible value, to our portfolio companies, that’s actually part of our investment thesis. And with Puraffinity, we identified a way to do that in the early days. [Puraffinity founder] Henrik [Hagemann] had built a great process and a great new vision for a material, and we were able to take expertise from our research group and we actually took a scientist, a PhD, from our research group, and they went to London, they spent time with the company—they spent a few months—adding some analytics and adding some process to what was already a pretty innovative solution, but now could iterate faster. So, in this particular case, with Puraffinity, we were able to speed up their development process, using the expertise from our great research group.

VC: And what do we bring to you, beyond the obvious?

JG: Well, we value integrity, it’s part of a core value for the Heritage Group. We always talk at the Heritage Group about ‘doing the right thing’. And I think that’s one that always stood out, with Henrik and his team, and now with you and the team and the culture at Puraffinity, is always doing the right thing with high integrity. You’re in an industry where you’re helping the world in so many ways, that feeds into one of the themes we’re always attracted to: sustainability; leaving our communities in a better place. That’s all part of what really drives our company and the Heritage Group. And Puraffinity fit very well into that theme.

Vincent, on the other side — what has the partnership unlocked for Puraffinity, beyond capital?

VC: I see at least three layers. The first is the HG Ventures portfolio itself, where we have peer companies working on adjacent PFAS challenges and a community of common thinking we can tap into.

The second is the Heritage Group’s research and labs, which were extremely valuable to us early in the journey and remain so today.

The third layer is the operating businesses inside the Heritage Group, with Envita as a clear example. They are established players in environmental services and now in PFAS, so they can be partners and also feed back to us important market intelligence we wouldn’t otherwise see.

Lessons for founders at the intersection of climate, regulation, and infrastructure

JG: What advice would you give to founders building hard-tech, climate, or infrastructure companies?

VC: Two main pieces of advice: First, it’s a race against time. Don’t wait too long before you go to the outside world. You will make mistakes. You will get negative feedback on the technology, on the service offer, on something. But you will learn far more from the outside world than from another quarter in the lab.

Second, as soon as you can, bring in people who have already done it. It’s a natural human reaction to want to do everything ourselves. Sometimes it’s just easier and faster to bring in someone who has already walked the road.

JG: You’ve personally made the move from a major industrial company into an early-stage startup. What advice do you have for executives making that transition, and for founders bringing them in?

VC: For people coming from industry: be careful not to impose to your new ecosystem the recipe that worked in the past. Things are often the way they are for good reasons, and you need to take the time to understand them. Even when something looks fragile or improvable, remember that this team built something from scratch, and when you start a business like that, you have a thousand reasons every day to give up. They didn’t. That deserves real respect.

And for founders: be open to giving room to people who come from the industry, even if that means, as in my case, replacing the founder as CEO. The same person isn’t necessarily the right leader at every stage of the company’s journey. You can be excellent at starting something and not the right person to push it into the market — and vice versa. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s the journey.

JG: Closing thought: Where does the moment we’re in — climate, infrastructure, contaminants like PFAS — sit on your agenda for someone thinking about where to spend the next decade?

VC: Take water because it’s the one thing I know is getting higher, and higher, and higher on everyone’s agenda, and especially the agenda of industry. It’s not about dealing with a commodity at the cheapest price anymore, it’s about companies realizing they need to manage water in both quantity and quality if they want to keep operating. That’s a meaningful shift from where we were ten or twenty years ago.

I think anybody who wants to jump into the climate space, to jump into the water industry, I would just say probably yes, that’s a good idea, that’s a good place to be at the moment. Not only because it’s getting higher on the agenda of everybody, but also because it makes sense. I mean it’s getting higher on the agenda of everybody because we all see on a daily basis how important it is, and how important it is to manage it properly.

Founded out of Imperial College London, Puraffinity develops next-generation media targeted specifically at PFAS removal from water. HG Ventures is an investor in Puraffinity and continues to support the company through its research group and the broader Heritage Group network. We are proud to be partners with Vincent and the Puraffinity team as they take on one of the most stubborn contamination challenges of our time.

Watch the full interview here:

Reflections from the inaugural Industrial Water Forum.

For decades, industrial water has periodically been framed as ’the next big thing.’  Each cycle brought conviction, but rarely the structural conditions required for sustained adoption.

This time, the underlying conditions appear materially different.

Across capital flows, operating practice, regulation, and workforce, the signals we have been tracking have started to look less like another wave of enthusiasm and more like a real turning point. That is why we decided the moment was right to convene the Industrial Water Forum, which we co-hosted with Xylem at our headquarters in Indianapolis on April 30. More than 120 senior operators, founders, investors, and water experts spent the day with us, and the conversation confirmed many of the signals we have been tracking across the market.

The clearest articulation of that difference came from Antoine Walter, host of the (Don’t) Waste Water podcast, who opened the day. Antoine sketched three eras of water management: a long century of “the solution to pollution is dilution;” a century of vast centralized infrastructure; and now, an era of ‘marginal gains’.

The argument that mattered most, though, was Antoine’s observation that five long-running pressures in industrial water are accelerating simultaneously: physical infrastructure; the economics of water inside operating businesses; the workforce that runs all of it; the boundaries between sectors; and the regulatory environment. Together, they signal a structural change in the market.

Those same pressures surfaced repeatedly throughout the day, across operators, investors, utilities, and technical companies. Here are our key take-aways.

Infrastructure and economics finally rhyme

The infrastructure deficit is no longer abstract. Antoine Walter’s estimate of the true global water infrastructure gap — north of $48 trillion, roughly half the world’s annual GDP — puts the official $14 trillion figure in proper perspective. The official number is what utilities plan to spend; the bigger number is what is actually needed.

Aging systems, extreme weather, and rising community resistance to large new water users, with data centers emerging as a focal point, are creating a problem that no longer permits deferral.

What is new is that capital is starting to meet that reality on its own terms. Tom Ferguson of Burnt Island Ventures reframed water for the room as a “defensive, foundational, high-growth asset class”, not the charity-case investment category it was treated as a decade ago. The data behind this reframing was striking: water pricing rising at four times the rate of GDP in 2023–24; $8 billion in liquidity events in 2025 against a projected $3 billion; private equity activity up 3.5x year over year; exits up 7x since 2020. Series B through E rounds now exist in water tech where they barely did in 2019. The deficit and the capital are starting to rhyme.

The clearest takeaway from the morning corporate operator panel, moderated by Kristen Siemen, sustainability advisor to The Heritage Group and former Chief Sustainability Officer at General Motors, was that water continues to be materially undervalued on corporate balance sheets.

Cheap on the bill of materials but business-critical, water rarely justifies investment on cost-savings arguments alone. The shift happens when water moves from an efficiency discussion to a risk discussion: supply chain resilience, license-to-operate, operational continuity, and regulatory exposure.  That conversation moves capital in ways that efficiency arguments alone never have.

The talent transition is real, and underestimated

If economics is the loudest of the five forces, workforce may be the most underappreciated. The “silver tsunami” came up across multiple sessions: an estimated 50% of utility institutional knowledge could retire in the next five years. The risk is not simply labor shortage.  It is the potential loss of decades of operating knowledge that has quietly kept aging infrastructure functioning.  That is happening exactly as the sector is being asked to digitize, modernize, and absorb new contaminant rules.

The generational transition also creates opportunity. Younger workers bring the digital fluency the sector increasingly needs, while experienced operators carry decades of institutional knowledge that cannot be easily replaced. But the prerequisite is sobering: 90% of utilities still manage primary data on paper, and even sophisticated industrial operators lack line-level water metering across many of their facilities. Before AI optimizes anything, basic digitization has to happen. That is the current ceiling on optimization, not algorithm sophistication. It is also one of the more investable gaps surfaced across the day.

Sector boundaries are dissolving

Industrial water has historically been compartmentalized, with food, beverage, pharma, semiconductors, power, and utilities each running their own play. What we heard in the afternoon, included in the resource-recovery panel moderated by Walt Kozlowski of Xylem, suggests that one of the clearest market shifts is the erosion of traditional sector boundaries.

Point-source treatment is moving upstream across sectors. Treating contamination closer to its source reduces variability, regulatory risk, and long-term cost. Waste-to-value economics are reinforcing the same trajectory: copper recovery from semiconductor wastewater, protein recovery from food processing streams, sulfuric acid recovery from fab effluents. In more settings, waste streams are being reconsidered as recoverable production assets rather than disposal liabilities.

Corporate adoption is following multiple pathways at once — accelerators, venture arms, plant-level pilots, and product portfolio integration — and the dominant constraint is no longer technical. As more than one panelist put it, behavior change is harder than technology. Internal champions, procurement education, and institutional inertia are the stubbornest obstacles in this market, not capability.

Regulation as catalyst, not constraint

PFAS dominated the regulatory conversation, though not in the way we expected. The patchwork of federal, state, and local timelines is creating real uncertainty. But that uncertainty, paradoxically, is driving rather than delaying investment. Companies are increasingly unwilling to wait for regulatory certainty that may never arrive.

A consistent theme from the resilient infrastructure panel, moderated by Daniel Benitez of Veralto, was the need to build flexible systems that can adapt to unknown future regulations rather than optimize narrowly for today’s rules. As standards continue to shift, operators are prioritizing modular infrastructure, point-source treatment, and deployment models that preserve optionality instead of locking facilities into rigid long-term designs.

Regulation in this category will keep moving; the strategic question is whether an organization’s operating model can move with it.

Why all five at once changes the calculus

None of the forces Antoine highlighted are entirely new. Industrial operators have been managing water risk, aging infrastructure, workforce constraints, and regulatory pressure for years. What feels different now is that these forces are no longer evolving separately. Capital is accelerating into the market at the same moment workforce turnover is forcing digitization, sector boundaries are blurring around point-source treatment and resource recovery, and regulatory uncertainty is pushing operators toward modular, outcome-based deployment models.

Together, these shifts are changing how industrial operators think about water: less as a utility cost, and more as strategic infrastructure.

We are not declaring industrial water solved. The data infrastructure gap is real; the shared measurement framework that water still lacks — the GHG Protocol equivalent that came up repeatedly — is a meaningful constraint on corporate adoption; plant-level execution remains hard, and behavior change is slower than any technology curve. None of that should be glossed over.

But the room in Indianapolis offered the strongest evidence we have seen that this cycle is structurally different. The Series B–E rounds, the dedicated water funds, the corporate venture arms, the deployed installations, and above all the candor of operators willing to say what isn’t working, all point in the same direction. For years, industrial water remained a market defined by pilots, fragmented adoption, and difficult commercialization. The signals now look different: larger growth rounds, dedicated infrastructure capital, repeat corporate buyers, and operators increasingly willing to deploy rather than experiment.

The inflection point is the simultaneous restructuring of capital, infrastructure, regulation, workforce, and operating behavior around water as a strategic industrial system.

With thanks

Our thanks to Xylem for co-hosting, to our speakers and panelists, and to everyone who joined us in Indianapolis. The willingness of operators, founders, investors, and industry leaders to share openly across sectors was one of the strongest signals of all.

John Glushik recently sat down with Tim Boeltken, CEO and co-founder of synthetic fuels pioneer, INERATEC, to discuss the role of e-fuels in the energy transition, the realities of scaling chemical infrastructure, and what it takes to build a company designed for the long term. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

John Glushik (JG):   Tim, we invested in INERATEC in 2024, because we could see the enormous potential of sustainable aviation fuels and other e-fuels. But for those unfamiliar with this sector, perhaps you can help them level-set. Where do e-fuels sit in the broader energy transition, and why do they matter right now?

Tim Boeltken (TB):   Many people think of the energy transition as electrification. But the real challenge isn’t just electrifying what we can, it’s removing fossil carbon from the system altogether. That’s what we mean by ‘defossilization’. The world is built out of molecules, and we cannot electrify everything. We will continue to electrify a lot of things, but there are hard-to-abate sectors that simply cannot be electrified directly.

That’s where e-fuels and synthetic fuels come in. Aviation is the most obvious example, but we’re also looking at shipping, road transportation, and the chemical industry.

What drives us every day is the idea that every gallon, every ton of fuel we produce is a ton where fossil fuel stays in the ground.

JG: That’s a huge issue you’re tackling. Take us back to the early days; how did INERATEC come together, and what problem were you trying to solve when you started the company?

TB: INERATEC was founded in 2016 as a spin-out from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, one of Europe’s leading universities in chemical engineering. Our core technology—compact, microstructured reactors—had been developed for more than two decades before we started the company.

During our PhDs, our funding partners basically told us: ‘You can’t keep doing R&D forever. You need to bring this technology into industry.’ So we did.

What surprised us was how quickly the market responded. Within the first year, we sold our first plant to a customer in Finland. We didn’t even really know how to send an invoice yet!

From day one, we weren’t focused on telling the best story to investors. We were focused on where the market was, how we could bring the technology into real use, and how to get customer proof points early.

JG: One thing that stood out to us early on was your modular approach. Please describe why that is so important?

TB: If you look at renewables over the last 30 years, everything is modular: solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electrolyzers. But chemical plants still look like they did 100 years ago.

We use well-known chemical reactions, but we rethink how they’re processed. By intensifying those reactions in compact, modular systems, we can build much faster and scale incrementally.

It’s not about what could be possible with 20 billion euros in ten years. It’s about what we can build now, how we can improve now, and how we can put steel in the ground.

JG: Yes, and speaking of ‘steel in the ground’, let’s talk about the ERA ONE plant. What does it represent for INERATEC, and for the industry?

TB: ERA ONE is our first commercial-scale production plant, and it’s a major milestone. From development to operation, it took a little over two years. In the chemical industry, that’s extremely fast.

We started operating the first modules in June 2025 and delivered our first product shortly after. That’s the proof point. People want to see plants running, not slides.

We built ERA ONE to demonstrate and de-risk the technology. Even though we were confident in our modular approach, this is still a conservative industry. Seeing a plant operate over time matters.

Now that box is checked. The future is about scaling into as many projects as possible, either as a producer, a core investor, or an OEM supplying our technology globally.

JG: You chose not to rely on a single EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction contractor) to build ERA ONE. What did you learn from that decision?

TB: A lot!

We decided against using one major EPC because our technology is very innovative, and we didn’t want to spend time educating someone else on the full scope of what we were doing.

That made execution more complex. Contract management and site management were difficult, and we had to build internal capabilities we didn’t have before.

But the upside is huge. Today, we don’t just bring technology, we bring execution experience. That’s becoming a real differentiator as partners approach us for larger projects.

JG: What advice would you give to other founders building hardware-heavy, infrastructure-intensive companies?

TB: One big topic is insourcing versus outsourcing. Outsourcing can save cost, but you often lose control over quality.

We insourced critical steps like electrical engineering and reactor manufacturing. Whenever we faced delays in Frankfurt, it was almost always related to third-party contractors.

If ERA ONE had failed on quality, that would have been unacceptable. Keeping key capabilities in-house gave us confidence and control.

And you have to be prepared for uncertainty. While you’re executing, people will question your decisions constantly. That’s why having patient, aligned investors matters so much.

JG: That brings us to partnerships. What do you look for in investors and board members?

TB: Strategic alignment and an understanding of the system, not just the market. Different perspectives are important, but you need people who understand how these industries actually work.

With HG Ventures, the relationship is trustful and respectful. Discussions can be tough, but that’s a good thing, a sign of a strong partnership. You learn from them.

Governance was also a learning curve for us, especially coming from a German GmbH structure. But once we embraced board-level strategic discussions, it became a strength. You get clarity, alignment, and shared responsibility.

JG: Looking ahead, where do you see INERATEC in five to ten years?

TB: We want to be the leading producer of e-fuels and synthetic fuels globally, in a much larger market than today.

Climate change isn’t going away, but we also see strong demand driven by energy resilience and security, especially in Europe. Interest is growing not just from airlines and chemical companies, but also from defense and infrastructure players.

We don’t just have one shot on goal—we have several. With every plant we build, we strengthen our position.

The next project will be significantly larger than ERA ONE. It will require more capital, a larger team, and strong partnerships. But we’re hungry to do it again—bigger this time.

FREDsense, a pioneer in rapid water testing technology, has announced the close of its USD $7 million Series A funding round led by HG Ventures, with participation from Emerald Technology Ventures. FREDsense delivers practical, next-generation solutions for detecting PFAS —“forever chemicals”— by providing fast, portable testing equipment that allows customers to get results in hours rather than weeks.

The company has launched the first commercially available field-based PFAS detector and has seen early adoption across industries such as environmental consulting & services, water and wastewater treatment, energy and general industrial operations. By replacing lengthy lab turnaround times with same-day answers onsite, FREDsense enables onsite teams to identify contamination hotspots, verify cleanups, and optimize treatment more efficiently and at lower cost.

“Our mission is simple: make PFAS testing fast, accessible, and actionable,” said David Lloyd, CEO of FREDsense. “With support from HG Ventures and Emerald, we’ll expand production, deepen customer support, and continue improving our product so more sites can get answers on the spot.”

“Communities and companies need cleaner water, faster answers, and fewer delays,” said Ginger Rothrock, Senior Director at HG Ventures. “FREDsense puts lab-level insight into the hands of field teams, which is exactly what this moment requires. We’re proud to lead the round and support FREDsense as they scale.”

“FREDsense is bringing much-needed speed and practicality to PFAS testing,” said Clayton MacDougald, Investment Director at Emerald and newly appointed FREDsense Board Member. “When you can get reliable results the same day, you make better decisions, finish jobs faster, and reduce costs. We’re thrilled to back this team alongside HG Ventures.”

Looking Ahead

FREDsense is building toward long-term relevance in a market of extreme importance, where PFAS sits at the intersection of environmental urgency, human health concerns, regulatory enforcement and economic opportunity within a global multi-billion-dollar problem. With its first-mover advantage, growing commercial traction, and scalable business model, FREDsense represents a compelling opportunity for players in the PFAS space that are seeking differentiated tools to strengthen their portfolios and respond to regulatory and customer demand.

About FREDsense

FREDsense Technologies Corp. is a leading provider of innovative water quality testing solutions, offering field-deployable sensors that deliver fast, accurate, and reliable results. Its flagship product, FRED-PFAS™, revolutionizes the detection of PFAS and other contaminants, helping clients accelerate remediation projects and ensure regulatory compliance. For more information visit www.fredsense.com.