water-conservation
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Eric Adler Put a Speedometer on the Water Meter
A drought, three engineering students and one stubborn household mystery became Flume. Eric Adler's decade-long bet is that water changes when people can finally see it.
The Denver Guy Who Watched Sprinklers Run in the Rain - And Built a $22M Water Company
A dog walk during a Denver rainstorm turned into a decade-long bet: that the smartest thing a sprinkler can do is know when to stay off. 150 billion gallons later, Rain Bird bought the whole thing.
The Cal Poly Drought Project That Turned Your Water Meter Into a Snitch
Three Cal Poly engineers built a clip-on sensor that reads the meter you already have. It cut the average home's water use 14% - and turned drought guilt into a phone notification.
Hydraloop
Hydraloop is a Dutch water technology company that makes compact, in-home and in-building water recycling systems. Its certified, chemical-free devices collect and clean up to 85% of a household's water - from showers, baths, washing machines and air-conditioning condensation - and return it for toilet flushing, laundry, garden irrigation and pool top-up, cutting fresh water use and sewage output by up to 45%. Founded in 2015 by Arthur Valkieser and Sabine Stuiver, the company won CES 2020's 'Best of the Best' award and a 2022 UN WIPO Global Award, and sells decentralized greywater systems to homeowners, developers and the hospitality sector worldwide.
Arable
Arable is a San Francisco-based agricultural technology company that builds solar-powered, in-field IoT sensors and a cloud analytics platform to give growers real-time crop intelligence. Its flagship Arable Mark device measures more than 40 weather, plant, soil and irrigation metrics from above the crop canopy, and machine-learning models turn that data into decisions on irrigation, crop stress and yield. Deployed across roughly 19 countries, six continents and more than 20 crop types, Arable serves customers from Driscoll's and Treasury Wine Estates to Valley Irrigation.
Aro Homes
Aro Homes is a Silicon Valley home-building company that designs and delivers precision-engineered, net-zero single-family homes for established neighborhoods. By combining a repeatable off-site/on-site construction system with architecture from Olson Kundig, Aro aims to cut the typical 18-month build down to roughly 90 days while producing homes that generate more energy than they use, cut water consumption by up to 45%, and save an estimated 11.2 tons of CO2 per home each year. The company launched publicly in 2022 with a $21M Series A and treats housing as a repeatable product rather than a series of one-off custom builds.
Maher Damak
Maher Damak is the CEO and co-founder of Infinite Cooling, an MIT spinout that recaptures the water vapor escaping from power-plant and industrial cooling towers using electric fields. A French-American mechanical engineer with a PhD from MIT and a degree from Ecole Polytechnique, he turned a fog-harvesting experiment in the Varanasi Research Group into a patented technology that recovers water more than 100 times purer than a plant's circulating supply. His work has earned Forbes 30 Under 30, the Lemelson-MIT prize, and an Edison gold medal, and his charged-mesh systems are now being tested on nuclear plants including EDF's Bugey site in France.
João Machado
João Machado is the founder and CEO of Savearth, a Portuguese climate-tech startup that uses AI-powered acoustic sensing to measure hotel shower water use in real time and reward guests for using less. After reading that nearly five billion people could face water scarcity by 2050, he built a coin-sized device that installs in under a minute and has cut shower water use by up to 48% in pilots with hotel groups like PortoBay, Numa and Hilton. Savearth won the Portuguese edition of ClimateLaunchpad, closed a €400,000 round in 2026, and is scaling across Portugal and Spain.
Irrigreen
Irrigreen makes a digital, robotic sprinkler system that uses inkjet-printer-inspired technology to paint water onto a lawn with near-pixel precision. Custom zone shapes, weather-aware AI scheduling, and a single rotating head that replaces a half-dozen old-school sprays let homeowners cut outdoor water use by roughly 50% while keeping the grass green.
Moleaer Inc.
Moleaer is a California-based cleantech company that pioneered the industrial-scale production of nanobubbles - gas bubbles roughly 2,500 times smaller than a grain of salt. Its patented nanobubble generators inject oxygen and other gases into water with extreme efficiency, helping farms, fish operations, wastewater plants, lakes and industrial sites use less water, fewer chemicals and less energy. Founded in 2016 and led by CEO Nick Dyner, Moleaer has deployed thousands of systems across more than 55 countries and raised about $61 million through a 2022 Series C led by Apollo funds, followed by a 2025 global partnership and strategic investment from water-tech giant Xylem.
Infinite Cooling
Infinite Cooling is an MIT-spinout climate-tech company that helps the world's most water-intensive industries cut water loss and run cooling towers smarter. Its patented WaterPanel technology uses electric fields to recapture purified water escaping as plume from cooling towers, while its TowerPulse platform layers AI-driven analytics and real-time monitoring on top of existing cooling systems. Customers include power plants, data centers, refineries and manufacturers across the U.S. and internationally, including a flagship deployment with EDF, the world's largest nuclear operator.
Verdi
Verdi is a Vancouver-based agtech company building affordable, retrofit-ready irrigation automation systems for orchards, vineyards, and specialty crop farms. Founded in 2020 by UBC Engineering Physics graduates Arthur Chen and Roman Kozak, the company makes wireless IoT controllers and soil moisture sensors that install in minutes on existing irrigation infrastructure. Its AI-powered platform gives farmers real-time monitoring, leak detection, variable rate irrigation, and fertigation control from a mobile app - delivering documented results of up to 70% water savings, 90% labor reduction, and 10-20% yield increases. Backed by $9.5M total funding including a $6.5M CAD seed round in May 2025, Verdi counts E&J Gallo, Arterra Wines, and UC Davis among its customers, with 16,000+ acres automated across North America.
Shane Dyer
Shane Dyer is the CEO and co-founder of Irrigreen, an Edina, Minnesota-based company reinventing residential lawn irrigation with AI-powered digital sprinkler systems that use up to 50% less water than conventional setups. A Stanford-trained computer systems engineer and serial entrepreneur with three company foundings under his belt - including Arrayent, an IoT platform acquired for $37M - Dyer applied inkjet printing precision to lawn sprinklers, creating a 'water printing' system now deployed across 300+ installation partners in nearly every U.S. state. Irrigreen raised a $19M Series A in April 2025, bringing total funding to $35.89M, and has saved 400 million gallons of water for customers to date.
Arthur Chen
Arthur Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Verdi, a Vancouver-based agtech company building affordable, wireless precision irrigation automation for specialty crop farmers. A first-generation Taiwanese-Canadian engineer, Chen studied Engineering Physics at UBC on a Schulich Leader Scholarship before launching Verdi from an academic capstone project in 2020. By 2025, Verdi's IoT platform operates on over 5,000 acres across North America, has saved more than 100 million liters of water, and raised $9.5 million in venture funding - making farm automation accessible to the 95% of growers who've never been able to afford it.
Ramsey Masri
Ramsey Masri is the CEO of Ceres AI (formerly Ceres Imaging), an Oakland-based agricultural intelligence platform that has analyzed over 17 billion plant-level measurements across 32 million acres and 40+ crop types worldwide. A UC Berkeley graduate who grew up on a family farm in Peru and spent 20 years as a California grape grower in Napa Valley, Masri bridges the worlds of technology, data analytics, and hands-on farming. Before Ceres, he served as COO at Zendrive and spent his early career at Oracle working under Larry Ellison, Ray Lane, and Tom Siebel. Under his leadership, Ceres rebranded as Ceres AI, raised a $13M Series D round led by Remus Capital in 2024-2025, was named to TIME Magazine's 2024 Top GreenTech Companies list, and made history by appointing the first AI board member in the agriculture industry.