Helios secures €1.2m from Backing Minds to purify the 'absolute worst' waters

Industrial wastewater is a messy – and costly – business. Sweden’s Helios Innovations thinks it has the fix: a plug-and-play system that cleans up water polluted with heavy metals, oil sludge, and PFAS, all from a container parked on-site.

“It’s basically a plug-and-play solution,” COO Johanna Gillberg tells Impact Loop. “You connect one pipe for the dirty water and get two out – one for the clean water and one for the waste.”

Gillberg co-founded Helios Innovations with Jonatan Persson, who built his first purification machine at just 17. The pair have financed the company’s early years through angel investors, small grants, bank loans, prize money from competitions.

“For instance, we won around €85,000 in a European competition a few years ago,” says Gillberg.

Scaling up

Now the company is entering a growth phase, raising €1.25m from venture capital firm Backing Minds, founded by impact investors Susanne Najafi and Sara Wimmercranz.

“Backing Minds has followed Helios for several years and we’re impressed by the team, their progress, and the smart way they’ve achieved product–market fit across different water solutions,” says investment partner Lisen Oliw. “The potential here is enormous — exactly the kind of company we want to back.”

Tackling the 'nasty stuff'

The fresh funding will go towards scaling up production and building more units. Helios currently has six facilities operating with customers and four more under construction – with strong demand expected.

“We have a solid pipeline. Every time we build a new facility, we already have a customer waiting for it,” says Gillberg.

While there are dozens of European water purification startups like Helios, the sector is far from uniform. Some focus on recovering valuable metals from industrial wastewater, others on treating municipal sludge or filtering PFAS. The diversity of approaches reflects both the complexity of the pollution problem – and the growing commercial opportunity to clean it up.

“We focus on the absolute worst waters,” Gillberg explains. “It’s all sorts of nasty stuff people don’t even think about.”

That includes contaminated water from pharmaceutical production and firefighting foam containing toxic substances. For every ten cubic metres of dirty water processed, about one cubic metre of concentrated waste remains. Prices depend on the level and type of contamination.

“This is very much a cowboy industry,” says Gillberg. “There are no real standards — everything depends on the water and what someone’s willing to pay to make the problem go away. But generally, our facilities have a payback period of between one and a half and three years.”