In an Interview with Insights Success, Bo Malmberg, Co-founder and COO of Altum Technologies shares the journey and contribution of Altum Technologies in the mining field. The company’s goal is to provide its customers with solutions that enable them to exceed their production goals and improve health and safety as well as environmental targets.
Below are the highlights of the interview between Bo Malmberg and Insights Success.
Give a brief overview of your company, its solutions and services?
When an industrial process is started, its operation is optimal. However, soon impurities start to accumulate in pipelines, valves, heat exchangers etc. reducing efficiency and requiring regular maintenance and repair.
The revolutionary Altum high power ultrasonic technology combines traditional ultrasonic cleaning with advanced beamforming techniques to localize and effectively clean a pre-defined target point. On top of this, Altum’s system is the only one in the world that can be applied externally to any existing production environment without making any changes to the production equipment.
Altum Technologies is the first and only company to use focused power ultrasound to remove fouling from industrial equipment without stopping the process, without dismantling the equipment and without using chemicals. We provide our customers the capability to increase their production output and operational & energy efficiency by enabling them to clean their production process without the need of stopping the production.
Describe the ways in which your mining solutions are focused on being customer centric.
Our solution is designed so that it can be easily adjusted to the specific customer needs. Also, one system can be utilized to solve several issues in different locations of the production process.
By monitoring remotely we want to assure that our customers are continuously getting the benefits that they are looking for by deploying our solution to their process. Additionally, we provide our customers the latest SW updates that include all the improvements to make the system more efficient.
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of your company.
Product must be easily tailored for several different business cases. Software and in the near future AI-enhanced software is the key to cost efficiently tailor products for changing use cases.
Company needs to provide agile services in the beginning to show tangible benefits to new customers. Seeing is believing, as we tend to say at Altum Technologies.
World is full of fouling issues. We’ve learned that it’s important to be pragmatic in solving the cases and admit that not all cases are perfect for the technology.
What are the evident challenges in the mining industry and what are your company’s strategies to tackle these challenges?
The main issues in mining are improving the production efficiency and at the same time making the operations environmentally friendly by reducing the environmental foot print. In addition, the improvement of health and safety is has an important role in the industry.
Our aim is to offer solutions to the mining industry that apply the process cleaning and scaling prevention to the production processes. This approach enables us to tackle these challenges by using only one solution. The production process operates more optimally and gives higher recovery rates, when it is free from scaling. Thus, the process is also more energy efficient.
The health and safety risks are reduced, when there is no need for the process equipment to be dismantled which, in turn, significantly decreases the need to use hazardous chemicals for the cleaning purposes of the equipment.
What is your perception on mining exploration in relation to climate change?As a highly energy intensive industry, the mining industry has its responsibility to reduce the impact to the climate change. Many companies have put lots of effort to reduce their environmental footprint over the past decade. At Altum Technologies, our goal is to be a part of this continuous work and take a place in the forefront of provided the needed tools to the industry, so that companies can proceed working and making remarkable improvements in the future.
It is also important to remember that new products can be created and developed with the use of raw materials provided by the industry. Such products may have even bigger impact to the total CO2 emissions globally such as electric cars, for instance.
Where does Altum Technologies see itself in the long run and/or what are its future goals?
Altum will become a major global technology provider in the field of process scaling prevention and cleaning. Our power ultrasound technology will enable different industries to tackle their issues and make industrial companies more profitable. In the future, we will open new offices in different continents and enlarge our partner network to serve our customers even better than today.
Client Feedback
The customer has said that after the planned pilot projects and transfer to production use, our solution will impact their operations in a significant manner.
Another customer found our solutions beneficial in reducing maintenance and increasing energy efficiency.
About the Leader
Altum Technologies was founded by COO Bo Malmberg and CEO Matias Tainela together with other four co-founders in May 2016. Through their journey, Bo and Matias discovered that their customers were asking for a solution that would clean fouled equipment with power ultrasound without the need to stop the production. As Bo and Matias were lacking knowledge on how to develop such solution, they started to look for the best person to implement this vision.
After some days, all fingers pointed to Edward Haeggström, a professor from the University of Helsinki, Harvard and CERN. Edward approved the idea and highly appreciated Matias and Bo’s understanding of the industrial market needs. Edward already had a world-class team that can develop a high-power ultrasonic solution such as the one needed. This is how Altum Technologies begun its development.
Later the company received publicity attention after winning Slush 100 pitching competition in 2017. Bo Malmberg pitched Altum’s power ultrasound solution in front of thousands which led the company to creating connections with new customers and investors.