If you don’t work with industrial assets—think pipes, tanks, and more spanning industries from paper and pulp to oil and gas—you probably have no idea how big a problem microbial corrosion is.
There are major climate and financial impacts when microorganisms eat away at industrial equipment. Replacing corroded steel equipment worldwide carries a 1.2-gigaton carbon footprint and a $2.5T price tag each year, and microbes are responsible for up to 50 percent of all corrosion. Corrosion in certain industries can also cause environmental disasters such as oil spills.
But today, it’s hard to predict corrosion before it happens, determine if the corrosion is due to microbial growth, and tell if treatments are effective. Tests can take days, weeks, or months, and all the while corrosion continues.
Enter Corrolytics: a startup revolutionizing microbial-corrosion detection with an instant, on-site test that reports the type of corrosion, corrosion rate, and whether remediation measures are working.
“We are the only company in the world that can detect microbial-corrosion rates on-site and in near-real time,” says the startup’s CEO and Co-founder Anwar Sadek.
Corrolytics’s first product is a standalone, electrochemical testing kit. But the startup’s developing an in-line, automated product as well that won’t require people to conduct the tests—ideal for underwater pipelines and other hard-to-access assets.
Its tech can be applied to countless industries, but Corrolytics’s first market is oil and gas. Corrolytics aims to help the industry avoid climate disasters, lower emissions from replacing equipment, and minimize chemicals used in treatment, all while slashing the billions of dollars in damages corrosion causes to oil and gas pipelines each year.
“After doing more than 300 customer discovery interviews, 95 percent of all people we spoke to shared that they need a technology that can determine when microbial growth inside of industrial infrastructure can lead to corrosion and whether mitigation strategies are working or not,” Sadek says. “There’s a big need for this, and we have a technology that can truly make a difference in industrial infrastructure by bringing this technology to market.”
Corrolytics completed pilots in Brazil and Houston this spring and is exploring potential channel partnerships and joint-development agreements with those companies. Its team is now completing a scalable version of its technology, with a goal of having products available for sale in Q2 2026.
The startup is currently raising a roughly $3M seed round; interested investors can get in touch here.
Corrolytics spun out of the University of Akron, and Sadek relocated to Texas in 2023 to join Greentown Houston and tap into the region’s unmatched energy industry. Corrolytics quickly made waves in the local ecosystem—winning the Minority-owned Business Award and People’s Choice Award at the 2024 Houston Innovation Awards, being named among the 10 most-promising energy tech startups at the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship’s Energy Tech Venture Forum in 2024, and gaining acceptance into the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator Cohort 4.
“Greentown is in the energy capital of the world and gives unparalleled access to major industry players, other founders I can talk to, and resources including introducing me to investors,” Sadek says. “Every month, there’s an event going on that really helps me connect with all the players in the ecosystem. We have had our most rapid growth after coming to Houston and joining Greentown Labs, in terms of partnership, in terms of deployment. Greentown has supported us in a very important way.”
