Drawn by the benefits of the federal Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ), a new company has located in the City of Coatesville with a high-tech solution to an old problem.

H2O Connected, LLC is an emerging growth company that produces the LeakAlertor product line of smart, leak, overflow, and running toilet detection devices for the more than 300 million North American tank-based toilets. The LeakAlertor was developed originally by nth Solutions, a vertically-integrated product development and manufacturing company located in Uwchlan Township.

With sales of the LeakAlertor growing rapidly, it made sense to spin off the technologies into a separate company. It is this anticipated growth that makes Coatesville, and its Opportunity Zone designation, attractive for LeakAlertor. One of the critical elements of the Opportunity Zone program is its ability to facilitate the investment of equity capital into companies like H2O Connected.

Access to capital is the lifeblood of emerging growth businesses. This program helps address one of the key challenges for young companies, finding early-stage growth capital.

“While most of the Opportunity Zone program attention so far has been on the potential for supporting real estate development, the ability of the Opportunity Zone program to attract startup technology companies to Coatesville is a potential game-changer,” said Sonia Huntzinger, Executive Director of the 2nd Century Alliance, a nonprofit focused on Coatesville’s economic development.

The architect behind bringing the LeakAlertor to Coatesville is Sue Springsteen, co-founder of nth Solutions and president of H2O Connected.

“We at nth Solutions have been following the Opportunity Zone program for quite a while and were very pleased to see that the City of Coatesville in Chester County was selected to be a part of the program,” said Springsteen. “Part of the nth Solutions business model is to incubate companies around the patented technologies we develop for ourselves and our clients. When it makes sense, we spin them off into separate emerging growth businesses.

“Being able to locate in an Opportunity Zone is a real tangible benefit to our investors. Coatesville is the perfect spot for us, and as H2O Connected grows, so does our Coatesville workforce and the economic impact we can contribute to the community. It’s a win-win.”

Coatesville City Council president Linda Lavender-Norris welcomes the new addition to the Coatesville business community.

“We hope this will be the first of many new commercial enterprises attracted to the city by the Opportunity Zone as we work to return to our roots as a center of commerce for Chester County,” she said.

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