Five years ago, David Zamarin appeared on Shark Tank to pitch his company DetraPel, which sold non-toxic water- and stain- repellent treatments. At the time, Zamarin was an undergraduate at Babson College, although he'd founded DetraPel when he was 15 years old.
Zamarin’s goal was to create sustainable materials and solutions in the chemical space that did not incorporate PFAS, a group of synthetic chemicals that have been linked to adverse health outcomes and do not easily break down in the environment.
The young founder started out focusing on consumer products to grow his revenue, but in the years since, he’s started to build out an industrial business with the same goal. While the consumer business got the early attention, Zamarin and his team felt it was time to shine some light on the industrial business.
“Because of the Shark Tank episode, the consumer business grew quite a bit. And as a result, we were just getting conflicted. I literally was just answering an email where someone is asking do we do this in industrial settings,” Zamarin said.
To stifle some of this confusion and set both the industrial and consumer sides of the business up for future success, today DetraPel announced a rebranding. The industrial side of the business will now be known as Impermea Materials. Zamarin said they will be announcing a new name for the consumer business soon, and the parent company will still be called DetraPel. To accommodate the company’s growth over the last few years, DetraPel also plans to move into a new headquarters more than double the size of its current Framingham facility.
“Impermea focuses on creating these solutions, these materials and chemistries, for all types of industries,” Zamarin said.
At the moment, the company’s biggest focus is on paper and food packaging as well as textiles, Zamarin said. Especially in food packaging, there is a movement to stop using plastic, but paper is not as naturally repellant to oil, grease or moisture. Zamarin said many companies use a coating of fluorinated chemicals, wax or plastic inside paper food containers. Impermea has its own chemical solution that doesn’t contain any of these materials.
“To give an example, the leading industry competitor will last about 45 minutes in the presence of oil and grease. Our coating lasts a guaranteed minimum seven days,” Zamarin said. “It’s an exponential benefit in performance, all without any harmful substitute bad actor chemicals.”
Impermea’s customers include paper mills and converters, who take paper rolls and put them through chemical processes for food companies. Zamarin said Impermea is also talking with companies like Chick-fil-A to showcase how their coatings work. If these companies like what they see, they might require their paper manufacturers to work with Impermea.
“There’s no reason that we need to be having chemicals in the food that we’re eating, of all places. So for us, it’s really about finding a viable solution, which we believe we have, and presenting that to the industry and getting it incorporated into some of the packaging,” Zamarin said.
Zamarin said Impermea and the consumer business operate out of the same 23,000-square-foot facility in Framingham. By the end of the year, they’re aiming to move into a new 100,000-square-foot space. Zamarin said they’re looking at spaces in Framingham, Hopkinton and Canton.
The company employs 15 people. After its Shark Tank appearance, DetraPel became a Mark Cuban-backed startup. Last year, DetraPel closed the first round of its $7 million Series A. Zamarin said he anticipates the next closing to happen in the next 60 days.
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