PureWater Ltd

What we do

PureWater designs, installs and operates continuous water quality monitoring networks for utilities, regulators and catchment partnerships. We supply the instrumentation — turbidity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, nitrate and temperature — the telemetry that gets data back from sites with no power or mains connection, and the analytics layer that turns a raw time series into an alert someone can act on, such as a probable sewage discharge or an unusual agricultural runoff event.

Market and customers

Public and regulatory attention on river water quality has changed the market from a slow, compliance-driven one into a fast, politically-driven one. Utilities are under obligations to monitor storm overflows continuously, regulators want catchment-scale evidence, and community groups increasingly want independent data. We serve all three, with utilities and regulators buying monitoring as a managed service — priced per site per year and including maintenance and calibration — rather than buying instruments and hiring the people to look after them.

Traction

We operate 410 monitoring sites across Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland, of which 260 are under managed service contracts averaging three years in length. Revenue for the last financial year was £980k with 84% of it recurring. Data availability across the estate has held above 97% over the past twelve months, which is the contractual metric our utility customers care about most and the hardest one to sustain in exposed river locations.

Team and investors

The company was founded from the University of Stirling's freshwater science group and employs 18 people, including a field services team of five covering the whole estate. The analytics team includes two freshwater ecologists, which keeps alert thresholds grounded in what actually indicates ecological harm rather than in what is easy to measure. Investors include an impact-focused angel group and Scottish Enterprise.

Current raise

We are raising £1.2M of seed funding to expand the estate to 1,000 sites, add continuous monitoring for phosphate and for a set of priority substances, and build the public-facing data service that catchment partnerships and community groups have been asking for.