FREDsense raises €6.4m Series A funding for PFAS detector

Funding drives growth

The Series A funding round was led by HG Ventures, with participation from Emerald Technology Ventures.

David Lloyd, CEO and founder, FREDsense, told Aquatech Online: “FREDsense is excited to be working with our incredible investors and partners to grow our impact. This funding will allow us to expand the capabilities of our detection products and grow with our customers to meet their PFAS monitoring needs. Working together, we can solve for PFAS.”

He added: “This investment fuels our next stage of growth – building manufacturing capacity, accelerating low-limit detection, and expanding our sales network to deliver our rapid PFAS testing technology where it’s needed most. It’s an exciting step toward a future, one where detecting and responding to harmful contaminants happens in real time, empowering smarter environmental action.”

Ginger Rothrock, senior director at HG Ventures, said: “Communities and companies need cleaner water, faster answers, and fewer delays. FREDsense puts lab-level insight into the hands of field teams, which is exactly what this moment requires. We’re proud to lead the round and support FREDsense as they scale.”

 

On-site, same-day pollution detection

FREDsense launched the first commercially available field-based PFAS detector. Early adopters include companies working in diverse industries such as environmental consulting and services, water and wastewater treatment, energy, and other general industrial operations. 

Traditional testing procedures would require sending samples to a lab for testing, which introduces unnecessary delays and additional costs into the process. FREDsense’s field detector replaces this process, allowing onsite teams to quickly identify areas of contamination. By doing so, it introduces the possibility of achieving both detection and clean-up of the pollutants on the same day, significantly reducing the costs of remediation and the potential environmental damage caused by the delay needed to send samples to a remote laboratory.

 

From UpLink winner to Series A success

For the company, Series A funding success follows its being named one of 10 UpLink Tackling Water Pollution challenge winners earlier in 2025. The award saw the company join the other winners as part of the UpLink Innovation Ecosystem, a collaboration which aims to unlock the potential of early-stage innovation.

FREDsense was awarded for making PFAS detection in water portable. Its detector combines a novel polymer with a fluorescence-based output into a single portable unit that can deliver PFAS measurements from multiple samples in the field. This drastically reduces wait time for PFAS measurement from up to 16 weeks in a lab for traditional techniques to a matter of hours, all delivered on-site.

This time savings, combined with the cost savings and kit portability, allows municipalities, industrial water users, and environmental consultants to collect the information they need to test water sources and protect public health more rapidly and expansively.

At the time of the award announcement, Lloyd told Aquatech Online he believed real-time data is key in the water industry, adding: “Our portable PFAS monitoring tool has the ability to change the game for so many in our world. This competition highlights how we can work together to make a huge impact on water quality and support our ability to bring real-time PFAS testing to the market.”