Algal Scientific was first conceived in July 2008 as our Chief Science Officer completed his PhD research relating to toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes. He formed a team with deep experience in the wastewater industry to devise a technology and business plan that could solve this problem. Drawing upon principles of bio-mimicry, our team realized that the best prevention of algal blooms in nature may be to create controlled blooms near the most concentrated points of nutrient discharge, where the algae that is generated can be an asset rather than a liability.

Using algae to treat wastewater is capable of providing significant savings to customers in areas where nutrients in wastewater result in high surcharge fees and/or expensive treatment upgrades required by their NPDES permits

Our team went on to become “Algal Scientific”, winning First Place in the inaugural DTE Clean Energy Prize competition, other awards at the University of Michigan, and finishing as a finalist in the biomass category in the MIT Clean Energy Prize. We've invested the awards from these competitions and grants to obtain cutting-edge biotech laboratory facilities at the Michigan Life Science and Innovation Center and fund research. Since that time we have recruited world-class advisors from industry and academia, and brought on board experienced leaders in wastewater treatment and business.

With additional funding, grants and awards from the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, the First Step Fund, Ann Arbor Spark, the NY New Energy Symposium, and private investors, we've performed bench scale validation of the technology on a wide variety of wastewater sources and more recently we've operated and successfully completed a six month field pilot installation. At this time we're designing and developing larger field demonstrations and initial commercial scale installations en route to full scale commercial installations in 2011.