WASE celebrated a major win at Slush this week after securing the People’s Choice Award at the prestigious New Energy Challenge, an annual competition spotlighting breakthrough innovation accelerating the global energy transition.
Slush 2025, Finland’s flagship startup and tech event, took place earlier this month on 19–20 November. The award followed a live pitch session in which twelve finalists presented their innovations on stage to an audience of investors, industry leaders and climate-tech pioneers.
Founded by Brunel graduate entrepreneur Tom Fudge after completing his MSc in Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and Design in 2016, WASE Ltd develops decentralised wastewater treatment systems.
The win marks a major milestone for WASE. WASE’s onsite systems turn organic waste into clean water and carbon-neutral biogas. This helps food and drink producers, farms, and industrial sites cut waste costs, create new revenue and see a return on investment in just three to five years. Its patented electro-bioreactor technology works 10× faster, produces 30% more methane, removes more waste and takes up 70% less space than traditional systems. The modular units can be installed quickly and are built to strengthen energy resilience and speed up biomethane and RNG production across the EU and the US.
The company’s rapid traction and pioneering approach are earning recognition across Europe and the United States. Its technology is increasingly seen as a critical solution for delivering grid resilience and enabling decentralised, circular energy infrastructure.
Tom shared: “Winning the People’s Choice award is a great recognition of our scale-up journey and growing traction in energy security. We’re raising our Series A, which will accelerate expansion across the EU and USA, and are on track to be generating over 80GWh of bio-methane and renewable natural gas by 2028”.
Beth Abbott-Stratford (L) and Thomas Fudge (R), WASE
Learn more about this year’s New Energy Challenge and winners here
A huge congratualtions to Tom and the WASE team from us here at the Brunel Entrepreneur Hub!