Mar 29, 2017, 7:46am EDT
Michelle Caffrey
Philadelphia Business Journal
It’s a brisk Friday afternoon at the a cluster of offices and lab spaces on Gray’s Ferry Avenue known as Pennovation Works, and tucked in the basement of a nondescript building on the 23-acre campus, Teri Dankovich is focused.
Clad in a white lab jacket and lavender-colored rubber gloves, the co-founder and CTO of Folia Water is conducting quality control tests for the startup's flagship product, a paper water filter that purifies drinking water for a penny a day per person.
The technology is more than ten years in the works as part of Dankovich’s doctoral and post-doctoral research. Yet the introverted chemist and her extroverted husband, Folia’s co-founder and CEO Jonathan Levine, are just settling into their new lab space after relocating operations to Philadelphia last week.
“We’ve had a non-stop couple of days,” Dankovich said as she took a break from working under a ventilation hood to discuss the move.
It was a big one for the pair, who decided to leave Pittsburgh, where Dankovich was a scientist at Carnegie Mello university and Levine was a scientist at the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory. The region wasn’t right for them, with its focus on robotics and medtech and lack of access to the type of paper manufacturing facilities Folia requires. Washington D.C. didn’t fit either – it moved too slowly for their needs. New York City and Boston were in the running, but the cost of living and doing business in both put them out of reach.
Then came Philadelphia, with its affordability, proximity to vendors, focus on social enterprises and academic institutions.
“We knew that we wanted to be on the East Coast, and we were trying to figure out which city makes the most sense, and we kept on coming back to Philly,” Dankovich said.
Levine was even more convinced after a chance meeting with Novapeutics CEO Frank Leu, who happened to be sitting next to Levine at the Pennsylvania Alliance for Capital and Technologies' IMPACT Capital Conference dinner in November. The two struck up a conversation about their day jobs and Leu sang the praises of the Pennovation campus, where his Penn spin-out is working on a cure for diabetes. A few weeks later he emailed Levine, telling him if Folia ever needed a lab, there was one at Pennovation waiting for them.
More than a dozen meetings and treks across Pennsylvania later — plus the persuasive tactics of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, which has been working with Folia to commercialize its technology — and the pair found their new home.
“Philadelphia is just small enough that everybody cares. When we’ve met business people in Philadelphia, we’ve gotten a very different reception than in other places,” Levine said. “Everyone in Philadelphia has been like ‘Come to Philadelphia, make your business here. Let’s work with you.’”
The access to both lab space and local manufacturing facilities was key for the startup. Folia’s technology is based on the concept of a simple paper packaged similar to coffee filters. Its special thick paper, embedded with silver but produced at the same cost as regular paper, uses nanotechnology to trap waterborne pathogens and remove them from drinking water as it passes through.
“This is what manufacturing looks like in the 21st century,” said Levine, who holds a Ph.D. in earth and environmental engineering and worked on water supply in Africa for the U.N. Millennium Development Project. “This is nano-manufacturing with nano-quality controls, except we make giants rolls by the ton.”
Each sheet, which is also sold in packs, is capable of filtering 100 liters or about 26 gallons. The sheets can be used with any funnel or with Folia’s inexpensive plastic Keystone funnel, which attaches to two 2-liter soda bottles to create a DIY water filtration device using materials billions of people already have access to. The shape of necessary cutouts on the filter just happened to look like a keystone, the pair said, making a fitting name for their Pennsylvania born-and-bred product.
“The technology is not very complicated,” Leu, of Novapeutics, said. “That’s why it’s so great.”
Given the glut of inexpensive water filtration devices in the domestic market, Folia is focused on getting its product to developing countries, specifically through product distributors, small business owners, NGOs, charities, nonprofits and universities that work in those nations. The husband-and-wife team also want Folia’s product in stores so individuals who lack access to clean water can pick up a filter sheet as they buy bread and other househould items.
Folia, which founded as a Benefit Corporation in January of 2016, is targeted toward people who make less than $10 a day. The region's expertise in bringing socially conscious products like Folia to market — Levine noted the nonprofit organization that certifies B Corps, B Lab, is based in Berwyn — is another reason the pair were drawn to Greater Philadelphia.
“They could’ve gone to a lot of places,” Leu, who is also an advisor for the Pennovation Works campus, said. “I think it says a lot about Philadelphia, that finally, maybe, the message is getting through to people in other parts of the country that Philadelphia is gaining momentum. We still have years to go, but we have our goal set high, and rightfully so, because we have the universities, the intellectual power and very qualified people, as qualified as Boston and San Francisco. We have the human capital here, and there’s definitely wealth too.”
He’s hoping that the growth of startups like Folia in the city may help ramp up available capital as well, by encouraging investors to take more risks. Folia itself is funded with a combination of awards from competitions, angel investments and its own revenues, but they’re seeking additional seed funding as they work with initial customers, and scale operations and manufacturing. Ultimately, the pair said the goal is to reach the more than one billion people on the planet who drink contaminated water, and improving the lives of others whose lives are held back by the time, expense and difficulty of obtaining clean water.
That makes them an exceptional catch for the region, Leu said. “I like to work with people who are really driven by a purpose of bettering the world, and they are definitely in that category,” he said.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify Dankovich and Levine’s positions in Pittsburgh, Levine’s work with the U.N. Millennium Development Project and the length of time Dankovich’s filtration technology has been in development.
Michelle Caffrey covers technology and education for the Philadelphia Business Journal.
