It started with a question nobody could answer.
For years, before Altum existed, Matias Tainela and Bo Malmberg imported sonic and ultrasonic cleaning equipment for industrial customers. The products worked, but only up to a point. They were never powerful enough to keep large industrial processes clean, and every system on the market asked the same thing of the customer: stop the line, take the equipment apart, clean it, and put it back together. For plants running evaporators, heat exchangers, pipelines, and other process equipment around the clock, that was exactly the part of the fouling problem nobody had solved.
So customers kept asking the same thing: “Could you supply one that doesn’t require stopping?”
The answer was no. Existing ultrasonic technology couldn’t deliver enough power to the right place, and there was no way to control where it went or how much of it actually reached inside the equipment. Matias and Bo could have left it there. Instead, they went looking for someone who could change the answer.
The Match Made in Helsinki
The search led them to Professor Edward Haeggström at the University of Helsinki, whose team had spent years pushing the limits of what ultrasound could do. When Matias and Bo described what their customers needed, Edward’s response was clear. He had the team to build it, and at last he had found people who understood the industrial market well enough to make it useful.
In May 2016 the five co-founders signed Altum Technologies into existence. The mission was clear from day one: clean fouling without stopping production, get rid of the chemicals, and start chipping away at the estimated 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions that industrial fouling is responsible for.
The Breakthrough Nobody Else Had
The hardware mattered. But the real breakthrough lived in the software.
Turning power ultrasound up, turning it down, focusing it on one specific spot inside a fouled pipe or other process equipment: that control was what unlocked everything else.
“The magic happens in the software,” co-founder Timo put it back in 2018. “Without it, it would be impossible to control the power ultrasound to do exactly what we want, when we want, and where we want.”
That level of control became the foundation of what is now Altum’s patented power ultrasound technology. No production stoppages. No equipment disassembly. No toxic chemicals.
2017: The Year Altum Went Public
The first commercial product, AltumPI, launched on 7 June 2017 at Allas Sea Pool in Helsinki, right across the water from the Presidential Palace. Press, customers from seven industries, and a live demo on a 500 mm metallic pipe. Within a minute the pipe was visibly cleaned, and the room understood what it had just seen. And in December 2017 came the moment that put Altum on the global map: winning Slush 100, beating out 2600 startups in front of one of the largesttech events in the world.
By the end of that first full year, the team had grown from 5 to 14, revenue had grown tenfold, and Altum’s system was running at more than 15 industrial sites.
Earning The Market’s Trust
The years that followed weren’t always loud, but they were the years that mattered most.
Deep-tech companies usually spend longer than expected earning enough trust in a new technology before the market commits to it. For Altum, those years went into the patient work of proving the technology one customer site at a time, in pulp and paper mills, mining operations, food production lines, and energy plants.
That trust eventually showed up as capital. After Lifeline Ventures’ SEED and Maki Ventures A Rounds, in December 2021, Altum closed a round backed by LocalTapiola, Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd) and Maki.vc. Two months later, London-based Salican Investments invested in Altum.
The same window brought a landmark partnership. In January 2022, Altum and Nippon Steel Engineering launched a joint Smart Cleaning Service, licensing Altum’s ultrasound technology for industries across Japan, from energy and petrochemicals to paper, food and beverage. A Japanese engineering company licensing the technology for its home market, where the addressable cleaning market was estimated at around $1.8 billion, said what the early demos never could.
By this point the customer roster was global. Stora Enso, Sappi, Metsä Fibre, Nippon Steel, Chevron, Sugal Group, Morning Star, and others were running Altum’s ultrasound technology in their daily operations.
A Two-Time Award Winner
In November 2024, Altum won the Capgemini Nordic Sustainability Tech Award, taking both the Finnish national title and the overall Nordic title in the same year. The award recognized what customers had already been seeing on their sites. Altum’s high-power ultrasound delivers real environmental impact through reduced energy use, fewer chemicals, and lower emissions, and it does so alongside the productivity gains.
A few months later, in March 2025, Altum won the New Sustainable Innovation Award at the 2025 Metsä Tissue Sustainability Awards, in partnership with the Cleaning and Services Support Association.
2025: A Breakout Year
2025 turned out to be the year the market shifted. As our CEO Matias put it in his end-of-year letter:
“The market has finally reached a level of maturity where our customers are no longer making one-off investments but are instead expanding their Altum deployments.”
The numbers told the same story:
- Revenue more than doubled at group level
- Revenue more than tripled in North America
- A record month for sales during the year
- An order book that entered 2026 already full
The team grew, and so did the map. Over the year Altum’s technology spread further across Europe, North and South America, and Asia, with new customer projects landing everywhere from India to Uruguay.
Entering The Second Decade
In 2026, Altum will begin delivering hazardous area certified systems to customers, the result of several years of design and testing in close collaboration with major partner organizations. Hazardous area certification opens up new possibilities to the chemicals and oil and gas segment to Altum.
The real shift goes deeper than any single product. For most of industrial history, cleaning meant reacting: let fouling build, watch performance drop, shut the line down, clean, restart, and wait for the same cycle to come back around. Each time, the bill is the same: downtime, cost and uncertainty. What Altum has changed in ten years is the loop itself. Fouling stops being a recurring emergency and becomes something you control continuously, while production keeps running.
A decade after that first conversation between Matias, Bo, and Edward, the original question, can you clean fouling without stopping production, has been answered, refined, and proven across continents and industries. The team is larger, the product is more capable, and the customer base is global.
But the mission is still the one we started with: keep production flowing with ultrasound, lower emissions, eliminate the chemicals, and turn sound into performance.
Ten years in, fouling still trembles. Here’s to the next ten.
Want to break the loop in your own process?
Talk to our team about what continuous fouling control could do for your equipment.
