Water is a terrible archivist. A river edits its banks, a storm rearranges a street, snow settles onto a roof and yesterday's measurement becomes a charming historical document. Javier Marti has spent the second half of his career arguing, in hardware and code, that societies deserve a better memory. His shorthand is brisk enough for a lift ride: “I'm building the Google Maps of water.”
The phrase makes a complicated system feel obvious. Divirod, the Boulder company Marti founded, gathers measurements from its own sensors, folds in public and customer data, checks the quality and turns the result into live intelligence. The aim is to show not merely where water is, but how a level, tide, snowpack or patch of ground is changing before change becomes damage.
There is a pleasing oddity in the machinery. Divirod's sensors can listen to signals from navigation satellites after those signals bounce off the Earth. Water, ice, snow and terrain alter the reflection. The sensor does not need to shout into the sky. It pays close attention to an existing conversation, then lets algorithms translate the echo.
Boulder was not an accidental headquarters. Marti visited in 1999 and was taken by the city, the landscape and the easy reach of the outdoors. He returned home saying he had found the place where he wanted to live. The move took years, with the Netherlands and Chile still ahead of him, but he eventually kept the promise to himself. It is an appropriately patient origin story for a company that asks institutions to look beyond the next quarter and notice how a physical place is changing.
A radar education, then a wider view
Marti was born in Jerez de la Frontera in 1969 and grew up in Granada. He joined the first class of telecommunications engineers at the University of Málaga, then moved to the Netherlands. While working at the European Space Agency, he completed a summa-cum-laude doctorate at Delft University of Technology. His subject was time-domain electromagnetics for antenna and radar cross-section measurements. Even his youthful specialism sounds like a preview of reflected signals becoming useful information.
He spent 13 years at ESA, working on technical evaluation and later serving as a system engineer for Solar Orbiter. The Herschel and Planck satellite work brought team recognition from ESA and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Yet space was not the only scale available. Marti moved to Chile for five years and became a lead systems engineer for ALMA, the array of 64 large antennas built high in the Atacama Desert.
Chile sharpened the environmental contrast. Mountains and coast run like parallel arguments; the desert hosts instruments listening to the universe while scarce water governs life below. In the United States, Marti's focus came down to Earth completely. He became a project leader, then Head of Observatory, during construction of the National Ecological Observatory Network. NEON's reach ran from Alaska to Puerto Rico and Hawaii, gathering standardized evidence about changing ecosystems across a continent.
“That made me very aware of the changes we are experiencing.”Javier Marti, on his NEON work
The succession matters: antenna measurement, spacecraft, a desert observatory, a continental climate system. Each job enlarged the system around the instrument. By 2016, Marti had managed public projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but he felt a practical link was missing. Scientific knowledge could describe the world brilliantly without always giving a hotel manager, utility operator or emergency planner a decision for Tuesday morning.
The side project that sold wine
There was another education hiding in plain sight. In 2005, Marti and his wife started a company importing Spanish wine. They bought directly from wineries, handled import and taxes, managed distribution and sold to customers. He remembers it as early e-commerce and an end-to-end operation. It closed when they left the Netherlands for Chile, but the small venture taught a lesson that megaprojects rarely offer: the system is unfinished until value reaches a customer.
The domestic detail helps. Public biographies note that Marti's real passion is cooking. The engineer interested in enormous systems also likes the warmest possible transformation of inputs into an immediate result. Wine, cooking and water do not constitute a grand theory of Javier Marti. They do suggest that usefulness, for him, is best when someone can taste it.
How to listen to water
Divirod began with the recognition that climate change often arrives through water: too much, too little, too fast, frozen in an unfamiliar place or absent where a historical model expected it. The past becomes a less dependable guide as weather patterns shift. The operational answer is more local observation, more frequently, with a system able to combine many kinds of evidence.
The quiet loop · GNSS reflectometry
A sensor can watch the water beside a property, the snow load on a roof or the level of a reservoir. In Fukuoka Prefecture, a Divirod and OKI demonstration used GNSS reflectometry to detect and classify small terrain movements. The company presents the hardware as an entry point to a larger observation layer, not as a gadget customers must learn to babysit.
That distinction shapes the business. Divirod sells ongoing data and analytics, combining its measurements with other available data rather than treating each instrument as an island. For Marti, a map is useful because it connects conditions to choices: move cars from a threatened parking area, understand whether construction can proceed, watch a reservoir, or trigger an earlier emergency response.
Selling tomorrow to today's buyer
Marti is admirably plain about the commercial difficulty. Water risk is consequential, but many organizations are only beginning to understand how to quantify it. He has described traction as slow and prospecting as tedious. Perhaps one early adopter appears in every hundred conversations. Some customers arrive only after trying several existing approaches and finding that the end-to-end offer finally makes sense.
His answer is partnership. Divirod occupies the seam between companies that sell sensors and companies that build risk models. Marti urges founders in emerging categories to surround themselves with partners that can explain the path to adoption. Divirod has worked with organizations spanning connectivity, cloud analytics, engineering and cultural preservation. The partner does more than distribute. It gives a new category familiar neighbors.
“Google Maps of water” makes infrastructure software legible without a technical preface.
Own the seam between sensors and models, then invite both sides into the system.
In an early market, customer education is part of the product and partnerships are part of the interface.
Funding has followed in stages. A 2021 seed round brought Thin Line Capital and GoHub Ventures. In 2023, Divirod raised a $3.6 million bridge round from GHD, TDK Ventures and Thin Line Capital. In July 2026, water-infrastructure executive Michael R. Dyson and TDK Ventures president Nicolas Sauvage joined the board. The mandate is less poetic than mapping the world's water, and therefore useful: convert technical ability into measurable value for operators.
The return current
Marti's latest ambition bends the international journey back toward Spain. In 2026, he spoke of expanding Divirod there, working with public institutions and increasing contracted production to between 2,000 and 3,000 devices a year during the 2026 to 2027 push. The motive is not simply market entry. After more than three decades abroad, he says he wants to bring home what he has learned.
“I want to give something back. I want to help.”Javier Marti, 2026
He wants a Spain where technical talent and entrepreneurship are valued before people have to leave to prove themselves. The feeling is sharper because leaving served him well. The Netherlands gave him radar and space systems. Chile gave him an observatory and dramatic geography. America gave him continental ecology, Boulder and a company. The wish is to make circulation more useful than departure.
A $3.6 million bridge round supports product definition, commercial work and water-risk analytics.
New work spans analytics, hospitality, coastal observation and public water systems.
The Fukuoka demonstration extends GNSS-R from water surfaces to subtle terrain change.
A strengthened board and Spanish expansion plans move the conversation from possibility to adoption.
A map is a compact promise: if you can see the situation, you can choose a route. Marti's career has been an extended study of instruments that make the invisible legible, from antenna fields to distant galaxies to ecological change. Divirod brings that instinct to the wet, frozen and unstable surfaces around ordinary assets and lives.
The work remains stubbornly physical. Sensors must be deployed. Data must be cleaned. Buyers must be educated. Partnerships must carry a young category across institutional borders. And water, indifferent to product strategy, keeps moving. Marti's bet is that a better memory of that movement can buy us the most practical climate resource of all: time.