The former CEO and chief technology officer for one of Albuquerque's most prominent startups is launching a company he hopes can help meet some of the Southwest's growing sustainability needs.
Integrated OffGrid is the name of the new startup, and it's the creation of Charles "Chuck" Call, Ph.D., who spent close to four years helping lead biothreat surveillance company BioFlyte Inc. as CEO and, most recently, as chief technology officer. He stepped away as a full-time employee of BioFlyte in August but still sits on the company's science and industry advisory board.
Integrated OffGrid will be a manufacturing company, Call told Albuquerque Business First. He wants to start by building what he called "water boxes," or technological units that would use solar energy to generate water.
Those boxes would then be attached to small homes, also powered by solar energy, that Call said would be sold as kits. The entire home system would be renewable thanks to power generated by the sun, used for water generation and other essentials like lighting and cooking.
Once ready, those products — the standalone water boxes and sustainable home kits — could be used by communities across the drought-stricken Southwest where local aquifers are becoming depleted, or in disaster relief scenarios where water isn't readily available.
"Because of climate change, water is scarce. It's been a growing problem," Call said. "It's not like it's something that happened overnight and now we have to go do this. But I think we can all see that the availability of fresh drinking water is rapidly becoming a big problem."
The idea behind the solar-powered sustainability tech came from a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program he and one of Integrated OffGrid's co-founders, Geoff Aiken, worked on about 15 years ago. That DARPA program had a project to create and purify water for troops, particularly those operating in desert environments.
But the tech that came out of that program, which Call said was fielded by the U.S. Army, was powered by a non-renewable fuel similar to diesel.
Integrated OffGrid wants to adapt that technology and power it using solar energy. Call said the startup could have a "demonstratable prototype" of its water box ready to go within the next three to four months.
It'd use that prototype for pilot programs with different commercial partners who "can help drive the market adoption," he said. Building a prototype could cost over $10,000.
While the startup doesn't yet have its own dedicated facility, Call said it'll be based in Albuquerque. Its current team has four people, including Call, Aiken and Blake Ridgeway; Call said Integrated OffGrid is funded entirely by founder money at the moment.
Raising private capital in the form of a seed round could come further down the road. To get to that point, Call said his experience working in deep tech and energy systems — what he described as "building hardware and putting it in the field" — will help power his sustainability startup.
"Sometimes people use the phrase 'getting from zero to one,'" Call said. "You're starting with maybe some PowerPoint charts and some ideas, and you're trying to build a team, build a vision, attract the funding in order to get to the prototype stage.
"Then it gets easier because you've eliminated some technical risk," he continued. "Then the next step is to show that there's demand for that technology and reduce the market risk by doing pilots and demonstrations and those kinds of things. It's easier to attract capital the farther down that path you get."
