water-infrastructure
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Michael Vellano Built a Company Around the Streets Nobody Wants to Dig Up
A fourth-generation waterworks operator turned a century of family know-how into a modern playbook: repair what lies beneath cities, buy capabilities with care, and let field crews improve the technology.
Peter Brooks Is Building a Water Company With No Exit Clock
A Marine deployment, a Fulbright year in India and a string of unglamorous water jobs led Peter Brooks to an unusual business idea: buy the companies that keep water moving, then keep them for decades.
Gregg Semler
Gregg Semler is the founder and CEO of InPipe Energy, a Portland-based company that generates clean, around-the-clock electricity from the water already flowing through municipal pipelines. A serial clean-energy entrepreneur since 2000, he previously led PolyFuel, ClearEdge Power, and Lucid Energy, and spent years as a venture investor in the sustainable economy. His pitch is contrarian: instead of covering the planet with solar panels and batteries, harvest the predictable, weather-proof energy hiding in the millions of miles of pressurized pipe that move our drinking water.
Victor Romero
Victor Romero is the President and CEO of Delve Underground, a specialized underground engineering firm with 350+ employees and 21 offices across North America and Australasia. A geological and geotechnical engineer with over 30 years of experience, Romero joined the firm in 1991 when it was known as McMillen Jacobs Associates, rose through leadership roles spanning design, construction management, and regional management, and led the company's rebranding to Delve Underground in 2023. He is an industry-recognized expert in the Sequential Excavation Method (SEM) and has overseen landmark tunneling projects across the US, Australia, and New Zealand.