Atlantis Technologies Cleans Up at Angels’ Quick Pitch Competition

Atlantis Technologies is a San Diego cleantech startup that has developed proprietary, low-energy, chemical-free water desalination systems for treating industrial wastewater—especially the 1 trillion gallons of salty wastewater created each year by the oil and gas industry ‘s fracking practices. In a presentation last week, Atlantis CEO P.M. Curran said the company is now seeking to raise $475,000 to advance its radial deionization system, which he says uses 75 percent less energy than state-of-the-art technology by General Electric. Curran confidently predicted that Atlantic’s revenue would be higher than its expenditures in 12 months, that the company would hit annual sales of $5 million the following year, and it would get acquired by 2016 for approximately $50 million.

Curran was persuasive enough to win the people’s choice award Thursday night at the Tech Coast Angels‘ Fifth Annual Quick Pitch competition. (More than 500 people attended the event at Qualcomm’s Irwin M. Jacobs Hall.)  Seven judges from the Southern California angels group also gave Atlantis Technologies their award for best overall “quick pitch” of the evening.

The judges also issued two other awards. They gave their “best content” award for a presentation by Keith Mullin of Gamer Grub, a local startup that has created snack foods in convenient “Tear N’ Tilt” snack packs for die-hard computer gaming enthusiasts, and best style award to Derek Smith of Tesla Controls, a local startup that has combined wireless mesh networking with cloud computing to help commercial building managers reduce wasted energy.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.