desalination
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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.
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.
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.