Deep Dive: NUMiX Materials

Founded in 2018, NUMiX Materials was created by Katie Kolhoff, Matt Heise, Ian Wiese, Olivia Lugar, and Laurelle Banta. Several team members also participated in the Innovation Corps program in order to improve themselves and their project.

Read on to learn more about the NUMiX team and their I-Corps experience: 

NUMiX develops materials used to simultaneously purify water and recover critical metals, helping the environment while minimizing costs. Based out of Chicago, these materials remove dissolved heavy metals via sorbents 10x more efficiently than competing technology, reduce water treatment additives and subsequent waste by up to 95% compared to current processes, and minimizes toxic & precious heavy metals returned to earth as hazardous waste. Ian Wiese, CTO of NUMiX, graciously shared some of his experiences with I-Corps and updates on the company with us below.

Q: What were your experiences like going through the I-Corps program? 

Ian Wiese: The NUMiX I-Corps experience was thoroughly illuminating! While the company grew out of a class called NuVention at Northwestern University, which is very similar in structure to I-Corps, it became immediately apparent that we had significant growth to accomplish on the customer discovery front. We carried out over 50 interviews during the program and the market knowledge that we came away with stays heavily relevant through today.” 

Q: How was your time with I-Corps beneficial to your startup journeys?

Ian Wiese: “The hallmark of a successful startup is the pivot. While pivots can be precipitated by either technological or market considerations, it’s really driven by the customer discovery process.

A shining example came when we encountered an organization that could objectively benefit from the NUMiX technologies. Unfortunately, the person in the organization responsible for the hazardous waste budget, the area in which we could save them the most money, was not the person in charge of the raw materials purchasing budget. Through the customer discovery process we were able to see clearly a barrier that existed in the market of which we had been previously unaware, causing us to pivot away from that initial space.

Yet another example came when we expanded our prospective market to the mining sector. During an initial analysis of the industry-produced acid mine drainage, it was discovered that the bulk of the metals available for capture were of lower value than we had anticipated. This caused us to perform a techno-economic analysis of the system and learn that the initial iteration of our product was not economically viable in the mining space. Subsequently, we redesigned the material from scratch in order to be able to address a specific pain point of a specific target market. The entire process of that massive pivot was driven by the customer discovery process.”

Q: Any updates on your technology/company that would you like to share? 

Ian Wiese: Since graduating from the UWM I-Corps program NUMiX has subsequently been awarded over $450,000 in non-dilutive funding in the form of two SBIR grants. One through the NSF specifically looking at the applicability of our technologies in the Li-Ion battery recycling space. The other was through the DOE analyzing the applicability of selectively harvesting Uranium from various aqueous sources. We were able to start a lab in the Milwaukee County Research Park as well as onboarding our first three non-founder employees. Much of that success can be attributed to the doors that were opened for us by participation in the program.” 

Click the headshots below to learn more about each member of NUMiX Materials.

Katie Kollhoff, CEO

Matt Heise, CFO

Ian Wiese, CTO

Olivia Lugar, Co-Founder and Advisor

Laurelle Banta, Co-Founder