Tech Challenge SPotlight: Segura Water
Winning The Water Council’s Tech Challenge comes with a $10,000 prize, but the rewards are much greater than that, according to previous winners. In the coming weeks, we will profile the three winners of our spring 2025 Tech Challenge. The challenge sought innovations in three categories selected by our corporate sponsors, A. O. Smith Corporation, Badger Meter, Watts Water Technologies and Xylem.
Segura Water, based in Oxford, UK, won in the category of “lab on a chip” for water and wastewater applications. Learn more about Segura below in an interview with Jose Castro, founder and CEO.
We will launch our fall Tech Challenge, focused on water quality, on Sept. 2. We will hold a virtual Q&A about the challenge on Sept. 16. Click here to register.
“This recognition accelerates our path to commercialization and helps us build the partnerships needed to continue to scale.”
-Jose Castro, Segura Water founder and CEO
Tell us about your innovation.
Segura was born out of frustration and optimism. Having spent several years in water quality from New York to Guatemala, I always hear the same complaint: Lab testing is too expensive, slow and hard to do. Coming from a stint in the glucose testing industry as an electrochemist, I saw clearly that there are mature point-of-care diagnostic technologies that can be translated for water applications. This maturity helps not only speed of development but also scale and unit costs. We’re already able to produce on a large scale, and the cost of production is very low, giving us healthy margins and minimizing risk for clients as well as enabling distribution partnerships.
The technology focuses on specialty priority contaminants such as E. coli, lead, arsenic and PFAS. The whole experience is managed through a mobile app. This comes with several unexpected benefits and additional applications such as in-process optimization. It has also enabled potential integration partnerships with software companies. While we’re currently focusing on a small number of flagship clients, we’re actively discussing integration and distribution partnerships with several well-known water businesses. We remain focused on lead and copper rule applications, as it is a pain point that many utilities struggle with.
Why did you enter the Tech Challenge?
We saw the Tech Challenge as a unique opportunity to showcase Segura because it directly aligns with the call for lab-on-a-chip technologies that are real-time, portable and scalable. Our device is already at TRL 6+, with field pilots underway, delivering metals testing in minutes with no toxic reagents, minimal energy requirements and extremely high sensitivity – reducing false positives and negatives. The challenge sponsors represent exactly the kinds of partners we want to scale with, given their reach across municipal and industrial water sectors. Entering the challenge was a natural step to validate our fit with market leaders who share our mission of making advanced, low-cost testing accessible everywhere it’s needed.
How does winning the Tech Challenge affect your innovation?
Despite the strong water credentials of our team, there are always questions when bringing a breakthrough technology to market. Winning the Tech Challenge gives Segura a powerful layer of credibility, showing that leading industry players recognize both the problem we are solving and the robustness of our solution. It also amplifies the momentum of our current pilots with major utilities, reinforcing that Segura is not just a promising innovation but a trusted tool ready for real-world deployment. This recognition accelerates our path to commercialization and helps us build the partnerships needed to continue to scale.