A Minneapolis environmental-tech company has raised $55 million to push its plan for permanently destroying PFAS from promising science into a bigger commercial operation. Claros Technologies says the new capital will help it build more systems, expand testing services and chase demand from manufacturers, utilities and cleanup agencies facing a chemical problem that refuses to go away.
The Series B round was led by Treehouse Family Capital and included Daikin America, Veralto, the Bush Foundation, Nord Asset Management and the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, according to a Claros Technologies release. The company said the financing includes previously announced convertible-note funding and will support commercial deployments in North America, Europe and Asia.
CEO and co-founder Michelle Bellanca told the Star Tribune that Claros has moved from breakthrough technology toward commercial reality. The company, founded in 2018, has now raised $84.5 million, and its ClarosTechUV system is already being used by Daikin America, according to the report.
Minnesota’s PFAS Cleanup Problem Gives The Technology A Local Test
The timing is especially relevant in Minnesota, where PFAS contamination has forced years of water treatment, monitoring and cleanup work. In May, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency recommended a regional groundwater treatment strategy for the east metro, a project tied to the state’s $850 million settlement with 3M; the agency said source-focused treatment could improve water quality and limit the spread of contamination.
That cleanup challenge comes with a price tag measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, as earlier Hoodline coverage detailed. Traditional approaches often capture PFAS in filters or concentrate it into another waste stream, while Claros is pitching a system designed to break down the compounds themselves.
New Funding Targets Manufacturing And Field Deployments
Claros says the money will expand manufacturing capacity, add commercial installations, grow its mobile ClarosLabs analytical division and fund hiring across engineering and commercial operations. The company also reported more than 99.99% destruction of targeted PFAS compounds in an April groundwater-remediation test using concentrate derived from roughly 1 million gallons of groundwater, according to its financing announcement.
Those results are company-reported milestones, not a guarantee that every future cleanup will be simple or inexpensive. The next test for Claros will be whether it can turn successful demonstrations into repeatable, permitted and financially workable deployments while Minnesota and other jurisdictions decide how aggressively to move from containing PFAS to destroying it.
