desalination
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Pani
Pani (Pani Energy Inc.) is a Canadian climate-tech software company that puts a digital brain on top of the world's water treatment plants. Its flagship cloud platform, Pani Zed, consolidates messy sensor data from desalination, industrial and municipal facilities, builds a digital twin of each plant, and uses machine learning to tell operators exactly how to cut energy use, extend membrane life, and lower emissions - without new capital equipment or retrofits. Founded in 2017 by Devesh Bharadwaj and based in Victoria/Vancouver, British Columbia, Pani deploys across facilities in multiple countries and has landed on the Global Cleantech 100 list.
Prakash Govindan
Prakash Govindan is the co-founder and CEO of Gradiant, the water industry's first unicorn, valued above $1 billion. Raised in Chennai during monsoon failures that dried up his family's taps, he turned a childhood of hauling buckets into a PhD at MIT and a company that now renews billions of liters of industrial water a day for clients in semiconductors, pharma, food and beverage, and mining. He co-invented Gradiant's flagship Carrier Gas Extraction technology, holds more than 100 patents, and helped bring the TIME Best Invention 'ForeverGone' PFAS-destruction system to market. A devoted bhakti yogi who has read the Bhagavad Gita some fifty times, he runs one of the fastest-growing water companies on earth while preaching egoless leadership.
Capture6
Capture6 is a climate-tech company that turns the salty waste brine left over from desalination and water treatment into two things the world needs: fresh water and permanently removed atmospheric CO2. Its integrated platform converts brine into a CO2-absorbing solvent in a single step, eliminating costly brine disposal while producing freshwater, green chemicals, and durable carbon removal. Founded in 2021 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area with operations in New Zealand, the public benefit corporation works with water utilities, industry, and governments across California, Western Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
Howard Yuh
Howard Yuh is a plasma physicist turned founder who is trying to break China's grip on magnesium by pulling the metal out of the ocean. As CEO and cofounder of Tidal Metals, the New Jersey deeptech he spun out of his earlier desalination venture GreenBlu, he uses an adsorption temperature-swing vapor pump - a trick borrowed from fusion research - to extract magnesium salt from seawater with only electricity, no mining, and no waste. The company raised $8.5M in seed funding led by DCVC in 2024 and won the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Mining Challenge the same year.
Gradiant
Gradiant is an MIT spinout turned global water-technology company that designs, builds, and operates advanced systems to treat, reuse, and recover industrial water and wastewater. Using a stack of proprietary technologies - from Carrier Gas Extraction to Counterflow Reverse Osmosis and an AI control layer called SmartOps - Gradiant helps semiconductor fabs, food and beverage giants, pharmaceutical makers, miners, and refiners cut freshwater use, recover lithium and other minerals, and destroy 'forever chemicals.' The first unicorn in the water industry, it reached a $2 billion valuation in 2026.
Ethan Cohen-Cole
Ethan Cohen-Cole is the CEO and Co-Founder of Capture6, a Berkeley-based climate technology Public Benefit Corporation that has cracked one of cleantech's most stubborn puzzles: making carbon removal pay for itself. By integrating direct air capture with desalination brine management, Capture6 turns the costly waste stream of water treatment into a revenue engine - producing fresh water, green chemicals, and permanent CO2 sequestration simultaneously. Before pivoting to climate tech, Cohen-Cole spent 25+ years as a PhD economist, Federal Reserve bank regulator, and finance professor, giving him an unusually rigorous lens on the economics of decarbonization. Capture6 raised a $27.5M Series A in March 2025, backed by Hyundai's ZER01NE Ventures and Tetrad Corporation, bringing total funding to nearly $49M.