Auckland startup raises millions for Covid detection push
Summary
Tether founder and CEO Brandon van Blerk say his company hit the ground running as it won a competitive tender for a $7m Kinga Ora (Housing NZ) remote-monitoring contract. Photo / SuppliedAfter an earlier setback, Auckland startup Tether is on the up, having just raised $1.75 million at a $10m valuation - and with a pandemic-related product launch set for later this month.Through a new smartphone app, with readouts friendly to laypeople, the company has adapted its $303 EnviroQ - a smoke-detector-sized device whose capabilities include the ability to read carbon dioxide levels - as "Covid Care" product to measure the safety of an enclosed space.CO2 is created when people breathe out, and gauging the level of CO2 in the air is a way of assessing if a room is ventilated well enough to minimise the risk of Covid transmission.With Auckland poised to reopen in earnest, founder and CEO Brandon van Blerk is aiming the product at the likes of retail outlets, schools, gyms, and aged-care providers, and has more than 2000 units in production.Van Blerk says one of his companys sensors can reveal that an enclosed space needs a ventilation system installed - but it could also be used to signal a simple measure, such as its time for a teacher to open a classrooms windows to let some fresh air in.Van Blerk initially bootstrapped his startup with money he made from cryptocurrency.The seed funding announced this week comes from new investors including the Crown-backed NZ Growth Capital Partners Aspire Fund, Impact Investment Fund (which features kina chairman Ben Kepes on its investment committee) and Greenside Energy Solutions (an insulation, heat pump and ventilation company that is also a Tether customer) is helping to bankroll the new product push.The raise comes after something of a 24-month rollercoaster ride for the 4-year-old firm.In late 2019, Tether seemed to be in clover. It won a highly competitive tender against 58 other firms, including Internet-of-Things (IoT) advocates Spark and Vodafone, to provide remote-monitoring of CO2 levels, humidity and a number of other elements in a number of Kinga Ora (Housing NZ) properties.Van Blerk was thrilled that his startup - which he says consists of "11 staff, all engineers with no salespeople" - had proved its chops against much larger competition to win the $7 million contract.But then there was a privacy scare over the remote-monitoring pilot, which was designed to collect data for a healthier homes push and to measure, as van Blerk puts it, "if a home was raining inside because of condensation on the windows. The first installations were about to begin in early 2020 when the first lockdown hit.After several delays, the pilot is now due to begin before the end of this year - but now scaled back to a $1.5m contract.Tether is still the sole supplier, but the downsizing of the project was still "like a punch to the guts" says van Blerk - who notes the downsizing came after responsibility for the programme was moved from one Kinga Ora division to another.Then there was more pandemic grief in the form of supply chain disruption and shipping delays.Tether manufactures locally but imports some components including the likes of microprocessors, resistors and capacitors. After that, it costs $4.32 per unit per month.Its now one of three gadgets in Tethers lineup, which also includes a specialised humidity and temperature monitoring device and the HotDrop for measuring energy consumption.Does the science stack up?In short, yes, with some qualifiers.The relationship between CO2 saturation and Covid transmission is the realm of peer-reviewed academic research rather than Facebook scuttlebutt.