# TELLUS Networked Sensor Solutions **Type:** venture **Status:** Draft **Confidence:** Medium **Focus:** air quality monitoring, environmental sensing, low-cost sensors, calibration, public health infrastructure **Stage:** Growth; 20–49 employees; seeking Series A (as of 2024–2025) **Location:** Salt Lake City, UT **Updated:** 2026-06-19 **Needs-reviewed:** 2026-06-19 **Hero:** https://picsum.photos/seed/tellus-2026/1600/1100 **Pull:** *Twenty years of calibration science turned into a low-cost sensor network that gives communities real-time air quality data at a fraction of what EPA-grade monitors cost.* **Relates:** cites [Official Website: TELLUS Networked Sensor Solutions](tellus-official-website.md) ## Summary TELLUS Networked Sensor Solutions is a Salt Lake City-based environmental monitoring company that builds low-cost, high-accuracy networked air quality sensors and the data infrastructure that makes them scientifically credible. Founded around 2018 as a spinout from the University of Utah College of Engineering (formerly operating as Tetrad Sensor Network Solutions), TELLUS commercializes two decades of academic calibration research into a deployable product: the CoreDI platform and, as of 2023, the AirU Pro hardware. Traditional EPA regulatory-grade air quality monitors cost $100,000–$200,000 each and are deployed sparsely — a major city might have five to ten of them. At that density, air quality data has low spatial resolution. TELLUS's network approach deploys many low-cost sensors, validated against collocated reference instruments and statistically corrected for drift, humidity, and temperature. Salt Lake City's valley air basin — which has some of the worst wintertime PM2.5 pollution in the US due to thermal inversions — has served as both the primary deployment environment and a validation laboratory for the platform. The company has NSF grant backing and is pursuing Series A funding. ## Impact The gap between what regulators measure and what people actually breathe is large and inequitable. Low-income and minority communities, which tend to be closer to industrial emission sources, are the most underserved by sparse regulatory monitoring. TELLUS's dense sensor networks can provide neighborhood-level air quality data that changes individual behavior (stay indoors during inversions, route around highway corridors) and supports epidemiological research linking localized pollution to health outcomes. The impact compounds as the network scales: each additional sensor in each additional city improves pollution-source attribution, supports regulatory enforcement, and generates the spatial data that researchers need to establish causal links between air quality and health. TELLUS's calibration heritage — 20+ years of co-deployment with reference instruments — is the credibility that allows its data to be taken seriously by government and academic users, not just consumers. ## What They Are Building TELLUS builds the full stack of networked environmental monitoring: sensor hardware (AirU Pro), the calibration and correction pipeline (CoreDI platform), real-time data delivery infrastructure, and the dashboards and APIs that governments, schools, health departments, and researchers consume. The key insight is that the calibration methodology — not the sensor hardware — is the product. Low-cost sensors are available from many manufacturers; the statistical correction pipeline that makes them scientifically credible is what TELLUS has spent 20 years developing. ## What They Need Now Likely needs include environmental engineers, sensor hardware engineers, data scientists with calibration statistics backgrounds, and software engineers building real-time data pipelines and public dashboards. The company is seeking Series A funding, which suggests business development, government contracting, and growth-stage operational capabilities are also priorities. Field deployment and maintenance operations in multiple geographies will require logistics and technical support staff. ## Who Could Help Useful helpers include municipal air quality program managers who can pilot TELLUS networks in their cities, EPA and state environmental agency contacts who understand the regulatory landscape for air quality data, public health researchers who need high-resolution pollution data for epidemiological studies, and Series A investors with a public-infrastructure or deep-tech thesis. The company's NSF grant history suggests familiarity with government funding mechanisms. ## Utah Context Salt Lake City sits in a bowl-shaped valley that traps winter inversions, producing PM2.5 levels that periodically rank among the worst in the United States. This geography made Utah a natural proving ground for TELLUS's technology: the problem is acute, visible, and politically salient. The University of Utah's College of Engineering, which incubated the founding research, remains a potential source of technical collaboration. Utah's state government has shown interest in environmental monitoring infrastructure — the University of Utah air quality network received a national award in 2023, providing credibility for the broader platform. ## Evidence - [Official Website: TELLUS Networked Sensor Solutions](tellus-official-website.md) ## See Also - [Ripple Neuro](ripple-neuro.md) — another University of Utah scientific-infrastructure spinout; useful comparison for the spinout-to-company trajectory and government-contract revenue model. - [Utah Arch Research Group](utah-arch.md) — University of Utah hardware and systems research; overlapping academic ecosystem. ## Open Questions - What is TELLUS's current geographic footprint beyond Salt Lake City, and which cities or countries are active network deployments? - What are the revenue model details — subscription data access, hardware sales, government contracts, or some combination? - How does TELLUS's calibration accuracy compare to commercial competitors like PurpleAir and Clarity Movement on independent benchmarks? - What does the Series A term sheet need to look like to fund the jump from Utah-centric deployment to national scale? - What regulatory pathway would allow TELLUS data to be used for EPA enforcement purposes, and how close is the platform to meeting that bar? - The placeholder hero should be replaced with a cleared image of deployed sensor hardware or the Salt Lake City network when rights are confirmed.