Frisian startup Hulo.ai, which raised €2.3m last year in a round led by Lumo Labs and VP Capital, says its annual recurring revenue has doubled every year and is still under €1m.
Credit: this report is based on a story first published by MT/Sprout. Read the original at mtsprout.nl.
As reported by MT/Sprout, Hulo.ai builds software that finds leaks in underground drinking water networks using data that water companies already collect. The Frisian company was founded by Robbert Lodewijks (29), its chief executive, and Frank van der Hulst. The two met at pipe inspection company Acquaint in Leeuwarden, where Van der Hulst was CTO, and the basis for Hulo came from a project at water technology institute Wetsus.
Worldwide, 30% of drinking water leaks away before it reaches a tap, according to the report. In the Netherlands the figure is 5%.
The funding trail
Hulo was first set up together with the two founders of Acquaint, who had no active role. Lodewijks and Van der Hulst later continued on their own, partly so they could attract outside investment, and largely parted ways with the other two founders. They managed that by talking it through and with a loan, Lodewijks told MT/Sprout; the parties agreed not to share the amount.
In November 2023 the pair raised €800,000 from New-ttt and Lumo Labs and went full time on the company. Last year Hulo raised a further €2.3m in a round led by Lumo Labs and VP Capital, the investment vehicle of the Van Puijenbroek textile family. Part of that money went into building the sales team, now led by Ritse Klink, who spent ten years at Microsoft.
Pricing and traction
Hulo charges a subscription per kilometre of network it monitors in real time. The starter package covers 500 kilometres and costs €29,000 a year. Lodewijks said annual recurring revenue has doubled every year and is still below €1m. The company is not yet profitable and is investing in growth.
The breakthrough came in 2022 at Limburg water company WML, its first customer. In a period with twenty leaks, WML received 200 alerts; run through Hulo's software, the same dataset produced 25.
Why Brazil
The founders decided early to go abroad. "The Netherlands is too small and too slow," Lodewijks said (translated from Dutch), pointing to the country's ten semi-public water companies and long sales cycles.
Brazil came out of the company's own market research. Its first customer outside the Netherlands is Aegea, which runs the network of Rio de Janeiro. Hulo started there with 500 kilometres and is now in talks about 6,500 kilometres; Aegea has more than 30,000 kilometres of pipes in total.
What comes next
Hulo has six customers in the Netherlands, England, Italy, Poland and Brazil, and expects to add water companies in Spain and Taiwan soon. It has about twenty employees. Lodewijks expects growth to pick up from the last quarter of this year as several expansion talks with customers progress. The company's stated goal is to save four million Olympic swimming pools of water by 2035; it is currently below one thousand.
Original source: MT/Sprout, "Deze Friese startup speurt naar ondergrondse waterlekken: 'Willen 4 miljoen olympische zwembaden besparen'"
