Liquid Assets

The American Society of Civil Engineers grades U.S. water infrastructure a D-minus. Kevin Gast, co-founder, CEO and chairman of VVater, puts the bill for just maintaining it at about $1 trillion over the next 20 years. The systems are old, fewer people are training to run them, and the control software behind them was never built for an open internet. Kevin spun VVater out of a family engineering conglomerate that has done 14,000 to 15,000 projects over 60 years. Its answer to membranes, filters and chemicals is the Farady Reactor, which treats water with alternating current at under 12 volts. What we get into: Where the trillion dollars goes, and why few people are training to run the plants How old control systems leave water utilities open to attack Why the tap water you drink has already been used upstream, and why reuse is the real choice How the Farady Reactor treats water with electricity in place of membranes and chemicals Where it fits: resort pools, wastewater plants, factories and homes Kevin Gast is the co-founder, CEO and chairman of VVater, headquartered in Austin, Texas. He grew up in South Africa and watched Cape Town approach Day Zero. His book pick is The Count of Monte Cristo. Also available on: YouTube and at liquidassets.cc, with the full write-up and transcript. Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA. Premium water care since 1964.

New York City's Department of Environmental Protection moves 1 billion gallons of drinking water a day to more than 9.6 million people, and about 95 percent of it arrives by gravity from 19 upstate reservoirs. The watersheds are protected well enough that federal rules let most of that water be delivered unfiltered. It is the largest combined municipal water and wastewater utility in the country, and it is aging. A startup does not get to put a sensor on that by cold email. Anushree Sreedhar runs the Environmental Tech Lab at the Partnership for New York City, a structured pilot program built with DEP that gives companies a real way in. In three years the lab has partnered with 24 companies, helped two land commercial procurements, and has about five more underway. What we get into: Why a careful utility is careful for good reasons, and why that is a feature rather than an obstacle The four stages: challenge discovery, public posting, a two-phase evaluation, then a three-month proof of concept with an optional three-month extension Who is on the hook when a pilot stalls. The Partnership hosts the check-ins and holds DEP to the timelines; DEP assigns a project manager who sets the goals and KPIs The three buckets that cover almost every water technology: software, sensors, and energy and resource recovery The honest part: a successful pilot is not a purchase order. The companies that convert usually arrive with results and existing customers already behind them Applications for the fourth round are open now and close October 23. The challenges are open to companies anywhere in the world. Apply to the ETL. Anushree Sreedhar is Director of Innovation Programs at the Partnership for New York City, where she runs the Environmental Tech Lab with NYC DEP and the Buildings Tech Lab with NYC DOB. She patented a fire extinguisher redesign at 20 and came to water by way of product design, enterprise software, and vertical farming. Companies mentioned: Gryps, Manhole Metrics, InPipe Energy, Knaq. Anushree is reading Recoding America. Also available on: YouTube and at liquidassets.cc. Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA. Premium water care since 1964.

Tom Ferguson runs Burnt Island Ventures, the first venture fund dedicated entirely to water. In this conversation he lays out the investing case for a $1.6 trillion market most people have never thought about: where water sits on the S-curve, what changed around 2020, what exits actually look like, and what it costs the person running a small fund. Guest: Tom Ferguson, Founder and Managing Partner, Burnt Island Ventures Host: Ravi Kurani CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:46 The S-curve, and where water sits on it 4:35 Why execution, not ideas, is the bottleneck 11:18 Why now: what changed around 2020 16:18 What exits actually look like in water 19:40 The capital spectrum: venture, PE, search funds 21:46 Private credit and the water bond market 24:37 Where water needs people right now 26:30 From Imagine H2O to raising Fund I 30:32 Why they pass on most water companies 35:01 The weirdest ideas that turned out to be good ones 41:09 Agriculture, and the next PFAS investment 42:13 AI, data, and what still has a moat 48:21 Long sales cycles as a moat 49:44 Growing up between London and the west coast of Scotland 55:40 The unromantic reality of running a fund 1:02:24 Water rights, and why he stays out of them 1:07:21 The best life advice, from The Wire 1:09:14 Where to reach Burnt Island (not with AI) LINKS Burnt Island Ventures: https://www.burntislandventures.com Tom's podcast, The Fundamental Molecule: https://www.burntislandventures.com/the-fundamental-molecule Full episode notes: https://www.liquidassets.cc/water-trillion-dollar-asset-class-tom-ferguson/ Liquid Assets is a podcast about water through the lens of business, technology and policy. Subscribe: https://www.liquidassets.cc

The USDA Organic certification launched in 2002 and water will never qualify for it. Not because of a loophole, but because water isn't grown. That single fact sits at the center of everything Clara Sieg is building at Loonen, and it exposes a quiet gap in the clean-living movement that most consumers have never thought to question. Clara spent 14 years in venture capital before a round of IVF sent her down a rabbit hole she couldn't climb out of, and water turned out to be the one household category with no good answer. What we cover: - Why no bottled water can legally carry an organic label, and why conventional treatment was designed to eliminate pathogens, not preserve mineral quality, leaving disinfection byproducts behind while stripping minerals out. - Why spring water is not a guarantee of purity. Every spring Loonen tested across six months of US sourcing trips had at least one footnote: nitrates, arsenic, radium, glyphosate, or PFAS. Loonen's answer pairs a high-quality source in the Palomar Mountains outside San Diego with physical membrane filtration, no chemicals, all stainless steel from tanker to bottle. - How Loonen remineralizes after filtration, adding back Celtic sea salt, calcium, magnesium, and potassium to match the natural total dissolved solids of their source spring, typically between 110 and 170. - Why plastic and bottled water are a particularly bad combination. Time, heat, and light drive plastic degradation and leaching, and the bottled water supply chain maximizes all three. Loonen bottles exclusively in glass. - How roughly 90% of the approximately 50,000 to 55,000 community water systems in the US serve fewer than 5,000 people, and why aging infrastructure plus modern contaminants plus limited funding is a structural problem far wider than Flint. - How Loonen uses per-batch testing for microplastics, PFAS, bisphenols, phthalates, herbicides, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, with results linked directly from a QR code on the bottle. Clara Sieg is the Co-Founder and CEO of Loonen, a premium water company reimagining how bottled water is sourced, treated, and packaged. Before Loonen she spent 14 years in venture capital, most recently at Revolution Ventures. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarasieg Book rec: Count Down by Shanna H. Swan (2021). The researcher whose work on endocrine-disrupting chemicals put numbers to the problem Clara went looking for a solution to. The line from that book to Loonen is short. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/z_qRkjHHmTc Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

Your tap water passed every government test this morning, and it still contains contaminants the EPA has no mandate to remove. Zach Hamilton built 20 prototype reverse osmosis machines trying to solve that problem, and his answer is a laboratory-grade, all-stainless-steel RO system designed to last 20 years in your kitchen. His core argument is simple and a little unsettling: 150,000 separate water districts are doing their best, but the infrastructure is too old and too slow to protect you from modern contaminants. The solution has to happen at the tap. What this episode covers: - Why water is location-specific: source water, aging pipes, and your home's own plumbing all add their own signature to what comes out of the tap, making every water supply a different "soup" - How PFAS break the dose-makes-the-poison rule: as endocrine disruptors that mimic hormones, even trace concentrations at the parts-per-trillion level can trigger whole-system effects in the body - Why the regulatory clock moves too slowly: in Flint, the city waited more than a year after scientific confirmation before notifying residents, and that delay is structural, not exceptional - How reverse osmosis filters at the molecular level, forcing water through holes too small to see and diverting everything else to a waste stream, resulting in water so pure that minerals must be added back - Why Zach runs two UV stages in his prototypes to handle living contaminants like bacteria and cysts, and how he sees point-of-use filtration following the same decentralization path as building heating - The case against the printer-ink filter model: Aqueduct Research machines use standard, universally available filter media so owners are never locked into a proprietary replacement cycle Zach Hamilton is the founder of Aqueduct Research, a company building residential reverse osmosis systems from durable, non-leaching materials. https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachhamilton Book rec: "Finite and Infinite Games" by James P. Carse (1986). Zach has read it ten times. The distinction between games played to win and games played to keep playing reshapes how you evaluate almost every decision in business and in life. Also available on: YouTube: https://youtu.be/fvY6jZDabjc Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/