Water analytics startup led by Sphero co-founder raises $1M

BOULDER — Adam Wilson was looking for his next move.

The Sphero Inc. co-founder was getting antsy building robotics hardware and couldn’t stop thinking about the spotlight the Earth’s climate crisis has shone on the issue of water resources. 

“For the past few years, I really didn’t like the way the world was going in terms of the future of water, and I just decided I had to try to do something about it,” Wilson told BizWest. 

SPONSORED CONTENT

How Platte River Power Authority is accelerating its energy transition

Platte River Power Authority, the community-owned wholesale electricity provider for Northern Colorado, has a history of bold initiatives.

So, a couple of years ago, he put feelers out to his network of entrepreneurs. A former Sphero employee mentioned Javier Marti, a former European Space Agency engineer who’d developed a sensor that measures the reflection of GPS satellite signals from water on the surface of the earth and builds a spatial map of that water.

Wilson was intrigued. 

“When I learned that Adam from Sphero was interested, I was like, ‘Seriously?’’’ Marti said.

For Wilson’s part, “When I saw the device, it blew me away,” he said.  

The pair joined forces in 2019, and Divirod Inc., as the company is currently constituted, was born. 

The Boulder-based firm, which recently completed a $1-million fundraising round, developed the water measurement hardware, which is loaned out to clients such engineering firms or municipal water management consultants, and uses a cloud-based platform to analyze data, which is then sold to those clients. 

For example, the device can measure the snow on the roof of a large building and tell its owners when there might be risk of collapse, or it can analyze tidal changes and wave activities along the coastline to help communities improve flood infrastructure.

Marti is the CEO and heads up logistics and coding, while Wilson serves as head of product and leads manufacturing and business development efforts.

“Adam and I are fitting like a hand and a glove,” Marti said of the partnership between the two Divirod executives. 

The pair used the COVID-19 pandemic to build the Divirod team, which now totals seven members, and raise capital.

The recently closed $1-million round was led by investors Thin Line Capital and GoHub.

“We are very interested in climate resilience, particularly with respect to droughts and floods. With that, we looked at several dozen water technology companies, many of them extremely interesting,” Thin Line Capital Managing Partner Aaron Fyke said in a prepared statement. “Ultimately, we chose to support Divirod because it is providing the tools to allow decision makers, with billions of dollars of infrastructure at risk, to navigate the very real effects of climate change that already exist today, and will grow in the future.”

Divirod plans to use its new capital to improve its hardware and to beef up its marketing efforts. 

For now, the company is done raising money.

“This is the best part, now we can work again!” Wilson said. 

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the names of the lead investment firms.

© 2021 BizWest Media LLC