When I started PreSeed Now over three years ago, I didn’t expect to write the word ‘wastewater’ very often. But the very first startup we ever featured had that very focus, and we’ve covered others in the space since.

So let’s return to this unlikely fascination today, to meet Nafura, which has a fresh approach to cleaning up water used in industrial processes. Upgrade your subscription to get the full story while supporting us to keep tracking the UK early-stage startup world:

But first:

• Manchester-based Praetura Ventures and Edinburgh-based Par Equity have announced a merger, to create PXN Group, which says it will offer (subject to regulatory approval) “world-class investment programmes at scale and help build the Northern economy”.

– Martin

Nafura wants to zap industrial wastewater clean

Industries that use lots of water, such as the drinks manufacturing sector, can find themselves with huge amounts of wastewater they have a legal requirement to treat. But current approaches are far from ideal.

“We're living in 2025 and we've got advanced quantum computing and we can land a rocket on a floating barge, but when you look at what we're doing in terms of wastewater, is so archaic,” argues Harry Brooksbank, co-founder of Nafura, a brand new startup taking a fresh approach to dirty water.

“A standard treatment plant is like five acres of giant concrete tanks filled with muck, which just sits around for weeks.”

While many modern approaches to industrial wastewater treatment focus on low energy consumption, Nafura has gone for getting results quickly with a larger amount of energy.

“I think people have got the wrong idea about what efficiency is. Efficiency doesn't mean using less energy. It means getting more out of the energy you put in. And that's what we're trying to do,” Brooksbank says.

Nafura’s approach harnesses a process called plasma gasification, which is already used to treat other forms of waste.

The idea is that wastewater is pumped through Nafura’s device, where it is blasted by a plasma torch in a thermal plasma gasification process.

“We can destroy any contaminant. It doesn't matter if it's biological, chemical, or even physical microbes - solvents, nasty pesticides, or even microplastics. We can destroy them all in situ,” Brooksbank explains.

“We break it down to an atomic level. We can then separate those things out of the water, which means that you have water flowing in, everything gets broken apart and removed, and then the clean water comes out.

“There are many ways you can separate unwanted contaminants from water, but often you just end up with a big mix of stuff which is not necessarily useful; it's normally just a sludge. We break everything down into a single state which can be reused.”

Many modern wastewater treatment processes use biological mechanisms. But Brooksbank believes his approach has a clear advantage over these approaches.

“If you're relying on biology, unfortunately, there's always going to be something which can kill off whatever it is that's doing the treatment. Whereas for us, we are agnostic to what is coming down the pipe; we can destroy essentially anything.”

An additional selling point for industrial customers is that Nafura’s approach can replace a complex, multi-stage process with a much simpler, one-stage approach.

The story so far

Appropriately enough, Brooksbank’s background is in water. He has previously spent time protecting groundwater at the Environment Agency, done a PhD in the field of sustainable water treatment, and then worked as a hydrogeologist for an environmental consultancy.

He caught the entrepreneurial bug while working on an ultimately ill-fated crypto project in the time of NFTs. Looking to build on the positive sides of this experience, he eventually joined deep tech venture builder Deep Science Ventures as a founder-in-residence.

It was here that the idea for Nafura came together, as part of a partnership between Deep Science Ventures and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners’ CCEP Ventures arm, to tackle water scarcity in industry.

Led by Brooksbank and his technical co-founders, Nafura has reached the point where it has built a prototype device

“We managed to go from TRL 0 to TRL 4 [“Technology validated in lab”] in the space of four months and with less than $2,000,” Brooksbank says.

“We should be able to get to the point where we've got a commercially viable prototype in a very short amount of time.”

The startup is now exploring industrial markets. The chemicals industry is a priority, Brooksbank says, because it produces “a lot of really, really nasty wastewater, which contains material which is really difficult to treat in standard processes.”

Given Coca-Cola’s involvement, it’s perhaps no surprise the food and drink sector is another priority market for Nafura.

“Factories are often really frustrated with their processes because they're getting flagged up by regulators quite often. And they're often situated in urban environments where they don't have the capacity in terms of footprint to be able to expand. They might want to expand their production, but they can't because they would need another couple of acres of land in order to put a big concrete aeration tank, and that's just not feasible,” Brooksbank says.

Utilities companies and sewage treatment plants are other potential markest for the tech, he adds:

“There are a lot of contaminants which are currently not getting captured by standard processes, and emerging contaminants. And they also really struggle to expand. There are a lot of people who have said ‘we're receiving more and more wastewater, we need to hit this at higher and higher qualities and in higher speeds, but we just don't have the space to put additional facilities in order to manage this.”

Due to the small footprint of Nafura’s tech and this common desire for extra capacity, Brooksbank is selling it as a way to augment existing wastewater treatment processes – a space-efficient way to boost throughput.

“What we're offering is immediate increase in throughput capacity and resilience, because we can install one of these in the corner of your room, and overnight and it can give you 1,000 cubic meters more treatment capacity, or at least take some of the burden off your current systems.”

Brooksbank says Nafura plans to install its first industrial device at a Coca-Cola facility by the end of this year.

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