Sentry, a maker of water sensors and a real-time treatment monitoring platform for them founded by Canada-based Corkman Patrick Kiely has raised $2m in Series A funding.
ne of the investors, SKion Water is a provider of, and investor in, water technology and a subsidiary of SKion GmbH, the investment firm of Germany’s wealthiest woman, multi-billionaire heiress Susanne Klatten.
The other investor is Factor[e] Ventures, an investor in energy, agriculture, mobility and waste backed by UKAid, USAID, and theShell, Autodesk and Rockefeller Foundations.
The funding will help the firm achieve more rapid revenue growth and profitability, increasing the firm’s number of deployed systems from 80 around the world to about 400 by 2023, said Kiely, who has a PhD in microbiology from University College Cork.
The Carrigaline native employs a growing team of 12 staff, and is based in Prince Edward Island off Canada’s east coast. He said he had spent five years developing Sentry’s microbial sensor technology, which is manufactured there.
The firm’s technology reduces monitoring and maintenance costs for wastewater treatment, increasing efficiency, while reducing discharge events that pollute waterways after heavy rainfall. It also works in anaerobic digesters, maximising biogas production.
“Our sensor platform is also an ideal complement to Covid testing of wastewater streams. It can benchmark the relative quantity of detected Covid RNA to the concentration of wastewater. This allows for a more accurate estimation of the RNA per person in the community,” Kiely added.
Kiely previously founded ClearPod, a maker of systems to improve septic tank system performance, which is part of Island Water Technologies, a water tech incubator he founded that also includes Regen, a maker of solar-powered modular wastewater treatment systems.
