Venture investing in water has been a challenge for a long time. Ground water has been free or low cost in the western world for most of history, and infrastructure to support water treatment has been seen as a public good that, at best, would provide low IRR infrastructure level returns to investors supporting large projects. But, there are observable trends that indicate the future likely looks different…
Global freshwater demand is on track to exceed supply by 40% by 2030.
60% of the world’s irrigated agriculture is facing extremely high water stress.
Since 2000, water and sewer bills in the US are up 207%, against 93% general inflation.
We’re also seeing water costs rise with new infrastructure being installed to deal with shifting changes:
Orange County's Doheny desalination plant will produce water at $3,675 per acre-foot, against $2,254 for imported Metropolitan Water District supply.
Metro Vancouver's North Shore wastewater plant went from CAD $1.06 billion to CAD $3.86 billion, which works out to about CAD $725 a year for 30 years per North Shore household.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and water is as basic a necessity as it gets. As allocations tighten and costs climb for households, farms and ecosystems alike, we see room for venture-backed companies to help water go further, cost less and stay clean. If you’re a founder with a water solution that has strong ROI in any market and has global potential, we’d love to hear from you.
Sam Top 40 Under 40
Congratulations to Sam for being named one of Business in Vancouver’s ‘40 Under 40’! Our team already knew he was a rockstar but it’s always nice when the rest of the world acknowledges it. Sam leads with a rare combination of conviction, joy and relentlessness. From scouting deal flow, expanding our network, supporting our founders and all the extracurriculars in between, Sam is ‘all in’ every time.
Fund III investment #17 (49 total): Mowito Robotics
Factories waste a lot. Up to 8% of what they make is scrapped, along with all the energy and materials that went into it, and human error causes much of that waste. Robot arms could take on more of this work, but programming them is slow and expensive: every time a part changes, a specialist has to rewrite the code. Mowito’s physical AI removes that step. A factory worker shows the robot arm the task by guiding it through the motions, and the arm learns to handle variation on its own. Switching to a new part takes minutes instead of a day.
The technology is already running on production lines. At one customer, the share of defective parts slipping past inspection fell from about 30% to 1%. CEO Puru Rastogi (Carnegie Mellon, IIT) has been building robots since childhood and was a founding engineer at Clean Robotics. We invested in a round that will be publicly announced, including the coinvestor syndicate, at a later date.
