We are Aeroqual
A company dedicated to giving people the tools to develop their air quality intelligence – this is our story.
2001 - Founded by two bright sparks
Two bright sparks, Dr Geoff Henshaw and Professor David Williams, began working on a prototype air quality sensor and applied for a patent. Aeroqual was born.
2001
Early believers, the Williams family, joined us as cornerstone investors and provided funding for further product development.
2001
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved ozone as a sterilizing agent, prompting the team to commercialize our ozone sensor technology into a product used for health and safety monitoring and process control.
2001
We released our first product, the ozone portable monitor, to the U.S. market. Our portable monitors continue to be popular with professionals and enthusiasts and are used in a variety of indoor, outdoor and industrial applications.2005 - Cool Stuff
Doing cool stuff with sensors has always been part of who we are. In the early days we said yes to everything – no measurement challenge was too whacky. Antarctica, the Amazon, the troposphere. You name it, we did it.
2006
Some kind folks from the government gave us a research grant and we used it to bring sensor design and fabrication in-house, making GSS technology a core competitive advantage.
2006
We kept saying yes and growing and therefore had to move into larger facilities. Our new home was down an unassuming driveway in the leafy suburb of Mt Eden, in central Auckland – also home of Eden Park, for rugby fans – go All Blacks!
2007 - AQM compact air monitoring station
A customer asked us if we could make a complete air monitoring station, using sensors. ‘Easy!’, we said. Six months later the AQM prototype emerged.
2008
We released the AQM 60 which quickly became our flagship product. It rapidly gained popularity around the world, as it provided a cost-effective yet accurate solution to measure outdoor air pollution. At last, a real alternative to expensive analyser technology.
2009
2009
On the back of the AQM station, we released our first particulate matter (PM) monitor: the AQM 10 (later to be called the Dust Sentry).
2009
Quixote Transportation Technologies (QTT) in the U.S. introduced our AQM 60 for Road and Weather Information System (RWIS) monitoring. QTT was later acquired by Vaisala, who make awesome weather stations (but are still learning about air quality stations).
2010 - Dubai Municipality chooses Aeroqual
Dubai needed to upgrade their air quality network and chose to use fourteen AQM 60 stations to provide real-time continuous measurement of common urban air pollutants. Up till now no major city had ever considered using anything other than analyser technology for their long-term compliance network. We were chuffed to bits.
2010
Our first major industrial network was secured with Vale the Brazilian copper giant. Several AQM 60 monitors were installed at Vale sites in Brazil.
2011
Construction sites, quarries, mines and roadsides – we like helping our customers keep local communities safe and the Dust Sentry was perfect for the job. Keeping up with the tech-geek generation, email and SMS alert systems were a neat new feature.
2012
As the business grew and became increasingly complex, new skills were needed. An experienced commercial team joined us in the form of Mark Templeton (CEO), Noel Davies (Chairman), and Carl Beck (sales and marketing), along with some new investors.
2013 - Rise of low-cost sensor networks
As the research community built trust in using air quality sensors to take outdoor air pollution measurements, interest grew in using a network of sensors for wide-area studies of pollutants over space and time. In one project we deployed 60 ozone sensors near Vancouver to study ozone formation and distribution in the Fraser Valley.
In another study funded by the U.S. EPA and in partnership with consultants, Sonoma Technology, we deployed 23 sensors in San Joaquin Valley, California. The study helped regulators to decide whether or not a newly located government monitoring station was representative of the airshed as a whole.
These ground-breaking studies helped us to demonstrate the performance of our sensors to researchers and the government agencies alike.
2013
Proud moment! Our Dust Sentry was the world’s first nephelometer to pass MCERTS, the pioneering indicative particle monitoring standard of the UK’s Environment Agency.
2013
With MCERTS under our belt we went certificate-crazy and got ISO-9001-2008 as well. Like most things we picked it up quickly and quality management is now a major part of our culture – CARs, SCARs, OFIs, ECOs, we love that stuff!
2013 - A paradigm shift for air pollution monitoring
In 2013 the U.S. EPA release a draft Next Generation Air Monitoring Roadmap, acknowledging the limitations of traditional air monitoring methods and the promise of sensor-based techniques. Two other prominent articles of the time: The Changing Paradigm of Air Pollution Monitoring (Environmental Science & Technology) and Improving Air Quality Monitoring in Asia: A Good Practice Guidance (Asian Development Bank). Having battled industry orthodoxy for over a decade, we breathed a major sigh of relief. It sounds great being a pioneer, but actually it’s really lonely.
2014
The U.S. EPA featured us in their 2014 Air Sensor Guidebook, where our Series 500 portable monitor was highlighted among a handful of manufacturers. We got a mention for our ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide sensors.
2014
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) selected us for Focus700, a group of 700 high-growth potential New Zealand companies that receive a higher level of support from the government in their export markets. This began a close working relationship with NZTE that continues to this day.
2015
What do you call an air monitoring station that’s way better than the AQM 60? The AQM 65 of course! Our taste for obscure naming conventions continues. We made significant improvements to sensor performance, extended the operating temperature and lowered the detection limit for SO2 and H2S.
2015
Our air monitoring software, Connect and Cloud became standard on all units sold.
2016 - Winner: Most innovative hardware solution
We won the Most Innovative Hardware Solution category at the 2016 NZ Hi Tech Awards. It was a great night out…took a week to get over that one.
2016
When there’s some strange air pollution in your neighbourhood… Who you gonna call? NYC Department of Environmental Protection kit out a van with an AQM 65 and drive it round town to put polluters in their place.
2016
Breaking into the China market was hard work. We finally know we’ve cracked it when the Beijing EPA purchase three AQM 65 air monitoring stations for a research project.
2016
Further success in China with a 90-unit PM2.5 monitoring network for Shaoxing Prefecture in Zhejiang Province.
2017
Bursting at the seams with a growing team and wanting to expand production capacity, we said farewell to beautiful Mount Eden and moved to new bespoke facilities at Rosebank Road in Auckland.
2017
We added the particulate matter sensor to the portable line-up. It measures both PM2.5 and PM10, is lightweight and affordable = happy customers.
2018
Meet the AQY, the latest product to emerge from R&D, who managed to keep it secret for almost two years. Small in size, big in performance, the AQY sold strongly from day one.
2018 - Big news people
In March the United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) announced a 5-year Co-operative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with us. This agreement will combine the U.S. EPA’s air monitoring infrastructure and measurement expertise with our technology and field deployment experience. Over the next five years together we’ll be accelerating the shift towards a low-cost air sensor future.
