The man who fights for water, and means it literally
Prakash Govindan runs Gradiant, the first unicorn the water industry has ever produced. That sentence sounds like a finish line. For him it is a Tuesday. Every day his company's systems pull about 2.5 billion liters of wastewater back from the brink and renew it, cut roughly 6.5 billion liters of freshwater from being withdrawn, and sidestep hundreds of metric tons of carbon along the way. The plants doing this work sit next to semiconductor fabs, pharmaceutical lines, lithium operations, food and beverage factories, and oil fields. Most people will never see one. That is the point.
In April 2026 Govindan became chief executive of the company he co-founded in 2013, moving up from chief operating officer. The promotion changed his title, not his obsession. He still talks about water the way other founders talk about market share, except he can quote the number that keeps him up at night: roughly 346 billion liters leak out of the world's water networks every day. That is the leak he is trying to plug, one industrial client at a time.
Gradiant does not sell a single gadget. It sells a stack. Carrier Gas Extraction, RO Infinity, Selective Contaminant Extraction, and a PFAS destroyer called ForeverGone are all part of a proprietary toolkit that gets tuned to whatever poison a particular factory produces. The company employs around 1,300 people across 38 nationalities, with hundreds of engineers and scientists among them. It has raised in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars across its rounds, most recently a Series E. And it is profitable, which in cleantech is roughly as rare as rain in a failed monsoon.
A boy, a bucket, and a monsoon that didn't come
Chennai has a temperamental sky. Some years the return monsoon floods the streets. Other years it forgets to show up, and the taps run dry. Govindan grew up in the middle of that gamble. As a boy he and his brother would walk to the town center to meet a truck, fill buckets, and haul the water back up to the family apartment. The city sits on the coast, so seawater creeps into the groundwater and turns the borewells brackish. Water was never abstract. It was a chore with a weight to it.
His mother is a mathematician. His father was a businessman. Money was tight, but curiosity was not rationed, and a younger brother with a formidable mind gave Prakash a reason to study harder. He earned a master's degree at IIT Madras, then landed at MIT in 2008 for a PhD in mechanical engineering under Professor John Lienhard. The same year he won a fellowship from MIT's Legatum Center, which exists to fund technology businesses aimed at the developing world. His pitch: small, mobile desalination units for the brackish borewells of rural and suburban India. The bucket had followed him across an ocean.
The trick: make it rain indoors
The technology he chased is elegant enough to explain at a dinner table. Nature already desalinates water for free. The sun evaporates the ocean, clouds form, and rain falls clean. Govindan's approach, humidification and dehumidification, does the same thing in a box. Take a carrier gas such as ordinary air, humidify it into a cloud-like vapor mixture, then condense it back into fresh water. The humidifier and the dehumidifier are simple direct-contact exchangers built from cheap, non-metallic surfaces, and the heat is recycled between them. Govindan turned that idea into his doctoral focus. When a fellow researcher named Anurag Bajpayee got involved, it turned into a company. They called the flagship technology Carrier Gas Extraction.
Two temperaments, one basement, and a flight to Texas
Bajpayee asked Govindan to start a company more than once. Govindan said no more than once. He wanted to get married first. Life before the term sheet. Eventually the answer became yes, and in 2013 the two spun Gradiant out of MIT with a stubborn thesis: solve the world's hardest water problems with technology that is both sustainable and cheap enough that a factory would actually buy it.
The partnership works because the two men are wired differently. Bajpayee is the calm, deliberate strategist. Govindan describes himself as highly excitable and spontaneous, the kind of person who, in his own words, "can catch on fire at any point." One of them plans the campaign; the other combusts with ideas. In the early days that meant a prototype built in a basement lab and a first multi-million-dollar contract signed before the company had an engineering team to deliver it. So the founders delivered it themselves. Govindan personally flew to Midland, Texas, and to Wuxi, China, to install the machines. There is no MBA slide for that. There is only the willingness to get on the plane.
The oil patch turned out to be the beachhead. Fracking produces enormous volumes of dirty, salty water, and hauling it away is expensive. Gradiant's pitch was almost cheeky: stop buying and dumping, and reuse the water you already own. From there the company climbed into the harder, cleaner industries, where the water has to be not just recycled but near perfect. Semiconductor fabs need ultrapure water. Pharmaceutical plants need compliance. Lithium producers need to pull battery-grade metal out of brine. Gradiant built or acquired technology for each, assembling a patent wall more than 250 deep. Govindan's name is attached to well over a hundred of them.
Killing a chemical that was built to never die
The company's most public win is a chemical assassination. PFAS, the "forever chemicals," were engineered to resist breaking down, which is exactly why they now haunt water supplies everywhere. Gradiant's ForeverGone concentrates them into a micro-foam, then destroys them on-site with electro-oxidation, delivering water that meets or beats US EPA drinking standards, without shipping the toxin somewhere else to become someone else's problem. In October 2024, TIME named it one of the Best Inventions of the year. For a company whose entire product is invisible, it was a rare moment of visibility.
I knew for a fact that there was a big opportunity in the water space.
A truly learned person realizes that everyone is equal.
Two hours of meditation before the quarterly numbers
Here is the plot twist most water executives do not have. Govindan spent his childhood in India but had his spiritual awakening in Massachusetts, after meeting a Hare Krishna monk at MIT. Handed a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, he read the whole thing in one overnight sitting. He has since read it something like fifty times. He calls it "a manual for life," and, on a warmer day, "a love letter from God."
This is not a weekend hobby. He meditates on the sixteen-syllable Maha mantra for roughly two hours a day and reads scripture daily. He founded a Body, Mind and Spirit retreat and has sponsored more than 300 people to attend. He practices nonviolent communication in the Marshall Rosenberg tradition and teaches the Gita online. When he says "I fight for water," he is borrowing the warrior imagery of the Gita on purpose. He describes himself as nearly a pacifist, and reframes the text's battlefield as a metaphor for doing your duty without attachment to the reward.
His theory of leadership follows from all of this. He calls it egoless leadership, and defines it simply as having a clear higher purpose. His stated ambition is not just to make Gradiant big. It is to make it enormous, as a live demonstration that a company can be run on moral fuel and still win. "Happiness," he likes to say, "is not proportional to the money one has." Coming from the co-founder of a billion-dollar company, that is either a paradox or the whole point.
The plumbing behind your phone, your medicine, and your battery
It is tempting to file Govindan under environmentalist. The more accurate label is industrialist with a conscience. The water problems he solves are the ones hiding inside the supply chains of modern life. The chip in your phone was rinsed in ultrapure water. The pill in your cabinet was made in a plant that has to account for every drop it discharges. The battery in an electric car may start as lithium pulled from brine. Each of those steps generates water that is either too dirty to release or too valuable to waste, and each is a place Gradiant quietly sets up shop.
That is why the company can grow through droughts, downturns, and hype cycles. Water is not a trend. It is a constraint that only tightens. Govindan has built a business on the least glamorous, most inescapable fact in the world: everything needs water, nobody makes more of it, and somebody has to clean up what we use. From a boy hauling buckets to a CEO renewing billions of liters a day, the arc bends in one unbroken direction. He is still carrying water. He just found a bigger bucket.