Hey Grove,
As you read this, a Michigan consultant is pulling water samples from a contaminated site, packing them in a cooler, and shipping them off to a lab.
The results take weeks to months. Way too long.
Vernon LaLone, founder and CEO of Wave Lumina, spent almost ten years becoming the one person who could fix that.
He's built a PFAS detector small enough to fit in a laptop bag and fast enough to deliver results in 20 minutes.
Let’s dive in.
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In this week's issue
- A solution looking for a problem
- Good enough beats perfect
- The market next door
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A solution looking for a problem
Vernon knew he wanted to be a scientist by the fifth grade. He studied Biochemistry at Michigan State, then a PhD at Michigan.
Along the way he got very, very good at using lasers to measure impossibly small amounts of a molecule inside a single cell.
They set out to sell this technology to the world. The science was beautiful, but only a handful of labs in the world even work on this kind of thing. No market.
He walked away knowing whatever he built next had to meet that same lab-grade standard.
Vernon then spent another three years in a postdoc at Imperial College London, pushing the technology further and exploring commercial applications. No luck.
He came back home to northern Michigan and took a role at an analytical testing lab.
THAT'S where PFAS, known as the "forever chemicals”, landed on his radar.
PFAS are built around a carbon-fluorine bond, one of the strongest in nature. It's what makes them so useful in waterproof gear + firefighting foam. It's also what makes them nearly impossible to destroy.
They leach out of industrial sites/old firefighting grounds into soil + groundwater and eventually show up in the water people drink.
He'd already spent ten years mastering the exact kind of spectroscopy that could measure this stuff on site, so he pointed it at PFAS.
That became Wave Lumina's field detector.
Good enough beats perfect
Vernon came into Wave Lumina with an ambition to reinvent the common lab test for water. The goal was a mass spectrometer cheap and portable enough to carry into the field.
After some customer discoevry, the first breakthrough occured.
His assumption was they wanted to be as precise as possible. In reality, the most important thing about PFAs across a plot of land is
Is it going up or down in this or that direction?
Is it here? Where's the hotspot? Which samples are actually worth sending to the lab?
So he stopped chasing the perfect lab-in-a-box and started building a triage tool instead.
Earlier this season, Nili Persists spoke about Raman spectroscopy typically being the size of a refrigerator.
Vernon's fits in a laptop case he runs out of the back of an SUV.
You drop in a water sample, add his reagents, press a button, and it reads 4 samples in 20 minutes.
The market next door
The EPA only issued its first national PFAS limits for drinking water in April 2024. So if you were waiting on federal regulation to hand you customers, you basically had no market until last year.
Michigan, Vernon's home state, regulated PFAS years earlier. Consultants had been working on these sites for the better part of a decade.
Today the work lives in old firefighting-foam sites and shuttered military bases, land where PFAS soaked in decades ago and never left. Vernon's team shows up, runs the tests on site, and tells people where it's worst.
This and the bigger picture inspire Vernon.
At the end, he talked about building cutting-edge science jobs in a small town in northern Michigan where his entire team grew up and wants to stay.
Usefulness made it out to the field and turned into a real business. Get out there and build!!
Feedback
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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