The US National Science Foundation selected Azimuth1 in a highly competitive round of Small Business Innovation Research awards. The award will go to supporting our efforts to create a commercial product that learns from thousands of recorded environmental spills and the following cleanups. Our model, which we call EnviMetric, looks at an individual spill event in the context of the many others with similar contaminants, soil conditions, and groundwater flow. It then predicts how far, deep, and wide the contaminant is likely to have traveled, giving field researchers the extra time they need to carefully plan a remediation approach, and cutting the time and cost of searching for the contaminant plume more than in half.

As budgets for cleanup of hazardous chemicals grow more uncertain, and states look to focus their resources on efforts with the biggest payoff, EnviMetric will help guide the search for contaminant migration paths and quickly determine the most time and cost effective means of remedying the hazards.

If you’re familiar with the SBIR program, there’s something a bit unique about NSF’s program. They’re not a customer. They’re not interested in the technology other than its ability to create a positive impact on the US economy through jobs and sales. The NSF also told us this was one of the most competitive rounds of proposals they’ve ever seen, so we’re especially proud to be one of the 150 or so companies around the country who were selected.

A link to the NSF award announcement is here at NSF’s site.

If you’d like to follow our progress and hear more about this innovation as we publish it, we’ll send you updates directly before they go online.