Sealor lands $1.1M NSF grant to seal South Florida's flooding from below
What's the deal? SealorDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a coastal resilience startup from Miami-based climate-tech venture studio NexumaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, has won a $1.1 million National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant. The money moves the company from lab validation into field pilots across South Florida.
What's the endgame? Sealor targets a hidden problem: seawalls, drainage systems, and roads that fail from below as water erodes the porous ground supporting them. Rather than replace structures, it injects behind them and grows limestone-like material inside the ground, filling voids and cutting soil permeability.
Why now? The Phase II award follows a Phase I project that validated the technology in the lab. The company also recently cut its treatment time from about 12 weeks to 8 to 14 days.
"Florida's coastal infrastructure is often failing from the ground up," said Alexander Suma, founder and chief executive officer of Nexuma and Sealor. "By the time that cracks, erosion, or seawall collapse become visible, the underground damage may already be advanced."
What could go wrong? Sealor's initial focus is seawall rehabilitation and coastal ground stabilisation, with longer-term plans spanning foundation protection, saltwater intrusion mitigation, and contamination containment. Whether the approach holds up under real coastal conditions remains to be proven in the pilots ahead.
The signal: At $1.1 million, the grant sits in the roughly 46th percentile by size — modest against the far larger public sums Florida governments are committing to stormwater and resilience projects. It reflects a growing pattern of early-stage, tech-driven firms trying to complement large public infrastructure efforts with more targeted approaches to a region among the most exposed to sea-level rise and extreme rainfall.
Read more: refreshmiami.com
Image credit: U.S. Geological Survey
