Inertial Secures Phase I STTR Grant Ahead of Pre-Seed Round
The startup’s proprietary process captures water and carbon dioxide from industrial exhaust flows. The approach uses supersonic inertial separation to freeze carbon dioxide and water out of exhaust gases.
The inherent scalability of Inertial’s technology means it is capable of handling the vast quantities of exhaust produced by power plants while capturing significant amounts of CO2 and water with a single process.
“This Phase I STTR award shows that Inertial’s scientific innovation is sound, having gone through multiple rounds of internal and external review boards at the NSF, and provides essential non-dilutive funding for Inertial to advance its supersonic approach to water and carbon dioxide capture,” said Alec Houpt, founder and CEO of Inertial.
The STTR program aims to accelerate the commercialization of technologies developed through cooperative research and development (R&D) between small businesses and research institutions. For Inertial, the grant was awarded in partnership with Houpt’s graduate school alma mater, the University of Notre Dame.
“The funds will be used to optimize the axisymmetric nozzle and separation process, which Inertial is using by taking an iterative design-build-test approach,” he explained. The award is 50/50 between the startup and university, and will subsequently give Houpt access to the world-class supersonic and hypersonic experimental facilities on campus at Notre Dame.
“Since joining Resurgence, Inertial has firmly embedded itself within the Chicago cleantech ecosystem,” said Houpt. “Inertial is now headquartered at mHUB in Fulton Market, has contracted Cooley LLP as its lawyers for both corporate and IP needs, filed a provisional patent, and even flew out to Golden, Colorado, as a finalist in the West Gate LEEP program at the National Renewable Energy Lab.”
Moving forward, Inertial is using this momentum to launch into a pre-seed SAFE round in order to best prepare to go after the potential Phase II NSF funding associated with this project and to acquire a pilot partner for demonstrating its technology in a real-world environment.
// Resurgence is a cleantech accelerator led by the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in partnership with the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
