New Mexico Inno's 2024 Startups to Watch list highlights 10 startups we expect to capture headlines in the year ahead. The New Mexico Inno editorial team picked out the 10 companies through a nomination process and our own research and reporting.
You can read all about these 10 Startups to Watch in the Feb. 2 print edition of Albuquerque Business First. The startups will also be featured individually on the New Mexico Inno site in the coming days.
In early December, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced a state-led plan to buy $500 million worth of treated brackish water from private companies. The initiative, a type of "advance market commitment," is intended to spur private investment by ensuring companies have an end customer for their treated water, in the form of the State of New Mexico.
Lujan Grisham's announcement came as particularly exciting news for Undesert, a Los Alamos-based startup developing a solar energy-based water purification technology.
Co-founded in 2021 by Nicholas Seet, Undesert's CEO, and Hill Kemp, the startup's chief technology officer, it's in the process of commercializing a patented water purification technology devised by Kemp more than a decade ago.
That Salty Wastewater Purification, or SWAP, technology uses solar energy to purify different sorts of salty water, including water from underground brackish aquifers and from oil and gas drilling — a type of water typically referred to as "produced water."
Techstars' Industries of the Future Accelerator selected Undesert as one of 10 participants in its 2023 class. And the startup was a part of Shell GameChanger, another accelerator-type program run by Shell Corp.
Seet said Undesert's initial market is the oil and gas industry, which produced about 1.5 billion barrels of produced water in New Mexico in 2021, figures show. But the governor's recent announcement could point the startup in a different direction.
"In our case, yeah, we are focused on the oil and gas industry, but the carrot is so big in this New Mexico opportunity that we will divert some of our focus into solving this particular problem," Seet said, "which is how do we turn New Mexico's copious underground brackish water into perfectly pure water?"
Undesert's technology is applicable to both brackish and produced water, Seet said. It's what he called "application agnostic" because the SWAP tech can purify water that has up to eight times the concentration of salt content as seawater.
Produced water made from oil and gas drilling operations, for instance, is about six times as concentrated in its salt content as seawater, Seet said.
Undesert doesn't have any full-time employees besides Seet and Kemp currently, outside of some contractors, Seet said. The startup pulled in $120,000 through the Techstars accelerator and has also been self-funded by the two co-founders.
Shell Corp. is Undesert's flagship user, Seet said. The startup is also working with other oil and gas industry stakeholders and entities in New Mexico, like cities, to implement its SWAP technology.
Seet said Undesert will submit a final application to XPRIZE, a nonprofit foundation that awards funding to companies to encourage technological development. Engaging with other strategic partners will be a big part of the year ahead for the startup, too, he added.
And with New Mexico's recent advance market commitment announcement, Seet said Undesert has an opportunity to deploy and demonstrate its technology "right in our backyard."
