You may be familiar with the risks of grease going down the drain. It’s why you may be in the habit of pouring your leftover bacon residue into the trash rather than the sink. That’s easy enough, but on a larger scale, restaurants and other food service operations must be even more careful with where their grease is collected, lest it wind up in the sewer system.
Grease interceptor tanks are located in the ground of food service operations, designed to collect the waste before it goes into the sewers. But these tanks are only periodically maintained and emptied, opening the door for potential grease blockages and resulting sewage backup.
To combat this risk, Wake Forest alum Randy Batten tapped into 20 years of experience working in grease interceptor manufacturing and founded the Raleigh-based startup Kapillary. This startup provides a sensor system that supplies municipalities with real-time data for monitoring the fats, oils and grease (FOG) in their sewer systems.
Kapillary is a participant in this year’s RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP), a 12-week program for early-stage startups. (GrepBeat has previously covered several of XD Sensor’s fellow RAP cohort members, including Baby Bumps, CSPM Zero, Social Cascade, Soffos, Synergize, and XD Sensor.) By the end of the summer, Batten hopes to have conducted field trials with local cities and restaurants sites to establish product-market fit. He then plans to start building a team to launch his product in 2025.
The name Kapillary comes from the human body’s capillaries in the circulatory system, which take nutrients to the body’s tissues and organs—and remove waste.
“For the same reason that we all want to keep cholesterol out of our arteries, the city wants to keep fats, oils and grease out of the sewer system,” Batten said.
The target market is municipal pretreatment departments, which run the FOG programs in each city. Pretreatment is any kind of wastewater treatment that is handled at the point of discharge where the pollution is generated.
“All the laws and mandates from the federal and state EPA fall on these municipalities to achieve, and so really they own the problem the most, and we really feel that Kapillary can help improve outcomes the most,” Batten said.
Grease interceptors that are not maintained and emptied properly can cause blockages, leading to sewage backing up in city streets and nearby freshwater sources. Besides the major threats these consequences pose to human health, sewage backup also can cause property damage.
Quick Bits
Startup: Kapillary
Founder: Randy Batten (CEO)
Founded: 2024
Location: Raleigh
Website: kapillary.com
Funding: self-funded
As of now, municipalities inspect and empty grease interceptors about every few months, depending on the resources of the pretreatment department. With Kapillary, the battery-operated IoT sensors go into the grease interceptor to assess the container’s fullness. The data collected by the sensor is sent to the cloud, where pretreatment administrators can view it in a dashboard and set up alerts to take action when needed.
“If you can measure it, you can manage it,” Batten said.
Batten plans to generate revenue via a subscription model, which he said will be extremely cost-efficient compared to current solutions for pretreatment departments. Kapillary has been self-funded thus far.
With the startup headquartered in Raleigh, Batten hopes to become part of what he referred to as a “vibrant” ecosystem of technology companies. He is starting his customer trials in local North Carolina municipalities, with the potential to expand more broadly in the future.
“There’s a lot of excitement and buzz and opportunity in creating an IoT focused company here,” Batten said.
