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.
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.
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.