Greentech Media

Atlantium, founded in 2003 and based in Israel, has found what it believes is the secret to achieving the "total kill" of water-borne organisms. Its technology uses UV light, thus creating a system that can help anyone from factories to fish hatcheries to entire municipalities disinfect water much more efficiently than, say, boiling it all. Seriously, Atlantium has warranted a spot on our top 10 by innovating around the crucial and enormous market opportunity of water treatment and disinfection and building a startup that is already winning customers and landing a pilot project at Coca-Cola's Israel bottling plant.

Atlantium's secret, called Hydro-Optic Disinfection, is one borrowed from the world of fiber optics, in which communications-carrying light is propagated down the core of certain optical fibers by reflecting off the outer layers of glass. In the Atlantium system, UV light from sources outside the flow of water is sent into a quartz tube, which then reflects that UV radiation through the water, killing many times more organisms than competitive UV-based systems that put the light source directly in the tube or chamber and give the water only one or two passes of light. Given the level of disinfection Atlantium can achieve, some customers such as food processors may be able to bypass formerly separate stages of purification and pasteurization, saving significant operations and energy costs.

Like the lighting market, the water-treatment and purification market is well over $10 billion annually and was not, until recently, spoken of as a greentech market. Companies such as Atlantium are bringing this opportunity to the fore, worthy of investors' attention and, for Atlantium, a spot on our list.