water-scarcity
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Epic Cleantec
Epic Cleantec is a San Francisco cleantech company that builds onsite water reuse systems for buildings, letting towers and campuses recycle up to 95% of their own wastewater into clean non-potable water, recovered heat energy, and organic soil products. Its OneWater platform installs treatment in the basement so showers, sinks, and laundry water get reused on site instead of flushed to a distant plant. The company got famous for turning recycled building water into commercial beer, and it counts high-rise developers as its core customers.
Nicholas Dyner
Nicholas Dyner is the CEO of Moleaer Inc., the Hawthorne, California company that turned nanobubbles - gas bubbles 2,500 times smaller than a grain of salt - into an industrial-scale tool for growing more food, cleaning more water, and reviving dying lakes. A Cornell history-and-economics major who fell into the water industry through a GE leadership program and never left, Dyner has spent nearly two decades selling water-treatment technology in more than 90 countries. Since 2017 he has guided Moleaer from a wastewater experiment to over 10,000 installations across 55 countries, a partnership with Xylem, and a multi-billion-dollar category that barely existed before he showed up.
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.