California-based WaterHealth International Inc., which has previously raised funds from India's ICICI Bank and Anji Reddy, has raised more than $10 million for the first close of its series D round. The first tranche of the $20 million round has been raised from return backers Dow Venture Capital and SAIL Venture Partners. WaterHealth is a provider of water purification and disinfection technology, and serves about 1 million people in India. In 2005, the firm has also raised around $865,000 from India's ICICI Bank. Besides this, WaterHealth has also raised funds from Dr. K.Anji Reddy, the founder and chairman of pharmaceutical company Dr. Reddy's Laboratories.
"As we move to rapidly expand the number of communities we serve and achieve unprecedented scale, access to capital is critical to our continuing success," said Dr. Tralance Addy, Chairman and chief executive of WaterHealth International, in a release.
WaterHealth develops cost-effective technology for water purifying needs of the poor. It has about 600 systems installed around the world in Central and South America, Africa and Asia. With the new round of funding WaterHealth is looking to increase the number of people it serves from present 1 million to 1.5 million in India.
The technology that WaterHealth uses has been developed by physicist Ashok Gadgil and licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Using the purifying technology developed, the firm serves the community in several ways. It has developed community water systems which provides a community of 3,000 residents with up to 20 liters of safe, affordable drinking water per person per day. Then it also serves through water stores, which can produce more than 20,000 liters of purified water daily.
Another similar company that has raised funding is HaloSource, which launched its business in India in 2006 in partnership with Mumbai-based Eureka Forbes. It raised $11.5 million from Origo Sino-India Plc (OSIL) and Unilever Technology Ventures in July last year.
