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The Billion-Dollar Infrastructure Problem Vortex Fixes Without Digging Up the Street
Vortex built a one-roof business around an unglamorous civic bargain: renew the pipe, keep the city moving. Its mix of materials, machines, monitoring and field crews shows how infrastructure work is becoming a systems business.
Delve Underground
Delve Underground is an employee-owned heavy civil and tunnel engineering firm that designs, builds, and rehabilitates the underground infrastructure behind transit systems, water and wastewater networks, and energy projects. Founded in 1954 as Jacobs Associates and rebranded from McMillen Jacobs Associates in late 2022, the firm brings roughly 350 specialists across 21-25 offices in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to some of the most technically demanding tunnels, shafts, and deep foundations in North America and Australasia.
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.
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.
SewerAI
SewerAI is a Walnut Creek, California software company building AI for the people who keep the sewers running. Its Pioneer cloud platform and AutoCode computer vision tools help cities, utilities, engineers, and contractors inspect, code, and prioritize sewer pipe defects faster and more accurately than manual review.
Woodard & Curran
Woodard & Curran is a 100% employee-owned environmental engineering and consulting firm founded in 1979 and headquartered in Portland, Maine. With roughly 1,300 employees across 30+ offices in 14 states, the firm integrates engineering, science, design-build, and operations to solve complex water and environmental challenges for municipal, industrial, and government clients. From treating 11.7 billion gallons of drinking water annually to cleaning up Superfund contamination sites, Woodard & Curran positions itself as the firm that takes on the hard problems in water infrastructure and environmental health — not as a contractor but as a long-term partner.