Liquid Assets

The American Society of Civil Engineers grades U.S. water infrastructure a D-minus. Kevin Gast, co-founder, CEO and chairman of VVater, puts the bill for just maintaining it at about $1 trillion over the next 20 years. The systems are old, fewer people are training to run them, and the control software behind them was never built for an open internet.

Kevin spun VVater out of a family engineering conglomerate that has done 14,000 to 15,000 projects over 60 years. Its answer to membranes, filters and chemicals is the Farady Reactor, which treats water with alternating current at under 12 volts.

What we get into:

• Where the trillion dollars goes, and why few people are training to run the plants
• How old control systems leave water utilities open to attack
• Why the tap water you drink has already been used upstream, and why reuse is the real choice
• How the Farady Reactor treats water with electricity in place of membranes and chemicals
• Where it fits: resort pools, wastewater plants, factories and homes

Kevin Gast is the co-founder, CEO and chairman of VVater, headquartered in Austin, Texas. He grew up in South Africa and watched Cape Town approach Day Zero. His book pick is The Count of Monte Cristo.

Also available on: YouTube and at liquidassets.cc, with the full write-up and transcript.

Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA. Premium water care since 1964.

New York City's Department of Environmental Protection moves 1 billion gallons of drinking water a day to more than 9.6 million people, and about 95 percent of it arrives by gravity from 19 upstate reservoirs. The watersheds are protected well enough that federal rules let most of that water be delivered unfiltered. It is the largest combined municipal water and wastewater utility in the country, and it is aging.

A startup does not get to put a sensor on that by cold email. Anushree Sreedhar runs the Environmental Tech Lab at the Partnership for New York City, a structured pilot program built with DEP that gives companies a real way in. In three years the lab has partnered with 24 companies, helped two land commercial procurements, and has about five more underway.

What we get into:

• Why a careful utility is careful for good reasons, and why that is a feature rather than an obstacle
• The four stages: challenge discovery, public posting, a two-phase evaluation, then a three-month proof of concept with an optional three-month extension
• Who is on the hook when a pilot stalls. The Partnership hosts the check-ins and holds DEP to the timelines; DEP assigns a project manager who sets the goals and KPIs
• The three buckets that cover almost every water technology: software, sensors, and energy and resource recovery
• The honest part: a successful pilot is not a purchase order. The companies that convert usually arrive with results and existing customers already behind them

Applications for the fourth round are open now and close October 23. The challenges are open to companies anywhere in the world. Apply to the ETL.

Anushree Sreedhar is Director of Innovation Programs at the Partnership for New York City, where she runs the Environmental Tech Lab with NYC DEP and the Buildings Tech Lab with NYC DOB. She patented a fire extinguisher redesign at 20 and came to water by way of product design, enterprise software, and vertical farming.

Companies mentioned: Gryps, Manhole Metrics, InPipe Energy, Knaq. Anushree is reading Recoding America.

Also available on: YouTube and at liquidassets.cc.

Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA. Premium water care since 1964.

Tom Ferguson runs Burnt Island Ventures, the first venture fund dedicated entirely to water. In this conversation he lays out the investing case for a $1.6 trillion market most people have never thought about: where water sits on the S-curve, what changed around 2020, what exits actually look like, and what it costs the person running a small fund.

Guest: Tom Ferguson, Founder and Managing Partner, Burnt Island Ventures

Host: Ravi Kurani

CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro

0:46 The S-curve, and where water sits on it

4:35 Why execution, not ideas, is the bottleneck

11:18 Why now: what changed around 2020

16:18 What exits actually look like in water

19:40 The capital spectrum: venture, PE, search funds

21:46 Private credit and the water bond market

24:37 Where water needs people right now

26:30 From Imagine H2O to raising Fund I

30:32 Why they pass on most water companies

35:01 The weirdest ideas that turned out to be good ones

41:09 Agriculture, and the next PFAS investment

42:13 AI, data, and what still has a moat

48:21 Long sales cycles as a moat

49:44 Growing up between London and the west coast of Scotland

55:40 The unromantic reality of running a fund

1:02:24 Water rights, and why he stays out of them

1:07:21 The best life advice, from The Wire

1:09:14 Where to reach Burnt Island (not with AI)

LINKS

Burnt Island Ventures: https://www.burntislandventures.com

Tom's podcast, The Fundamental Molecule: https://www.burntislandventures.com/the-fundamental-molecule

Full episode notes: https://www.liquidassets.cc/water-trillion-dollar-asset-class-tom-ferguson/

Liquid Assets is a podcast about water through the lens of business, technology and policy.

Subscribe: https://www.liquidassets.cc

The USDA Organic certification launched in 2002 and water will never qualify for it. Not because of a loophole, but because water isn't grown. That single fact sits at the center of everything Clara Sieg is building at Loonen, and it exposes a quiet gap in the clean-living movement that most consumers have never thought to question. Clara spent 14 years in venture capital before a round of IVF sent her down a rabbit hole she couldn't climb out of, and water turned out to be the one household category with no good answer.

What we cover:

- Why no bottled water can legally carry an organic label, and why conventional treatment was designed to eliminate pathogens, not preserve mineral quality, leaving disinfection byproducts behind while stripping minerals out.

- Why spring water is not a guarantee of purity. Every spring Loonen tested across six months of US sourcing trips had at least one footnote: nitrates, arsenic, radium, glyphosate, or PFAS. Loonen's answer pairs a high-quality source in the Palomar Mountains outside San Diego with physical membrane filtration, no chemicals, all stainless steel from tanker to bottle.

- How Loonen remineralizes after filtration, adding back Celtic sea salt, calcium, magnesium, and potassium to match the natural total dissolved solids of their source spring, typically between 110 and 170.

- Why plastic and bottled water are a particularly bad combination. Time, heat, and light drive plastic degradation and leaching, and the bottled water supply chain maximizes all three. Loonen bottles exclusively in glass.

- How roughly 90% of the approximately 50,000 to 55,000 community water systems in the US serve fewer than 5,000 people, and why aging infrastructure plus modern contaminants plus limited funding is a structural problem far wider than Flint.

- How Loonen uses per-batch testing for microplastics, PFAS, bisphenols, phthalates, herbicides, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, with results linked directly from a QR code on the bottle.

Clara Sieg is the Co-Founder and CEO of Loonen, a premium water company reimagining how bottled water is sourced, treated, and packaged. Before Loonen she spent 14 years in venture capital, most recently at Revolution Ventures. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarasieg

Book rec: Count Down by Shanna H. Swan (2021). The researcher whose work on endocrine-disrupting chemicals put numbers to the problem Clara went looking for a solution to. The line from that book to Loonen is short.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/z_qRkjHHmTc

Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

The USDA Organic certification launched in 2002 and water will never qualify for it. Not because of a loophole, but because water isn't grown. That single fact sits at the center of everything Clara Sieg is building at Loonen, and it exposes a quiet gap in the clean-living movement that most consumers have never thought to question. Clara spent 14 years in venture capital before a round of IVF sent her down a rabbit hole she couldn't climb out of, and water turned out to be the one household category with no good answer.

What we cover:

- Why no bottled water can legally carry an organic label, and why conventional treatment was designed to eliminate pathogens, not preserve mineral quality, leaving disinfection byproducts behind while stripping minerals out.

- Why spring water is not a guarantee of purity. Every spring Loonen tested across six months of US sourcing trips had at least one footnote: nitrates, arsenic, radium, glyphosate, or PFAS. Loonen's answer pairs a high-quality source in the Palomar Mountains outside San Diego with physical membrane filtration, no chemicals, all stainless steel from tanker to bottle.

- How Loonen remineralizes after filtration, adding back Celtic sea salt, calcium, magnesium, and potassium to match the natural total dissolved solids of their source spring, typically between 110 and 170.

- Why plastic and bottled water are a particularly bad combination. Time, heat, and light drive plastic degradation and leaching, and the bottled water supply chain maximizes all three. Loonen bottles exclusively in glass.

- How roughly 90% of the approximately 50,000 to 55,000 community water systems in the US serve fewer than 5,000 people, and why aging infrastructure plus modern contaminants plus limited funding is a structural problem far wider than Flint.

- How Loonen uses per-batch testing for microplastics, PFAS, bisphenols, phthalates, herbicides, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, with results linked directly from a QR code on the bottle.

Clara Sieg is the Co-Founder and CEO of Loonen, a premium water company reimagining how bottled water is sourced, treated, and packaged. Before Loonen she spent 14 years in venture capital, most recently at Revolution Ventures. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarasieg

Book rec: Count Down by Shanna H. Swan (2021). The researcher whose work on endocrine-disrupting chemicals put numbers to the problem Clara went looking for a solution to. The line from that book to Loonen is short.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UbEQsnTeIbU

Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

Your tap water passed every government test this morning, and it still contains contaminants the EPA has no mandate to remove. Zach Hamilton built 20 prototype reverse osmosis machines trying to solve that problem, and his answer is a laboratory-grade, all-stainless-steel RO system designed to last 20 years in your kitchen. His core argument is simple and a little unsettling: 150,000 separate water districts are doing their best, but the infrastructure is too old and too slow to protect you from modern contaminants. The solution has to happen at the tap.

What this episode covers:

- Why water is location-specific: source water, aging pipes, and your home's own plumbing all add their own signature to what comes out of the tap, making every water supply a different "soup"

- How PFAS break the dose-makes-the-poison rule: as endocrine disruptors that mimic hormones, even trace concentrations at the parts-per-trillion level can trigger whole-system effects in the body

- Why the regulatory clock moves too slowly: in Flint, the city waited more than a year after scientific confirmation before notifying residents, and that delay is structural, not exceptional

- How reverse osmosis filters at the molecular level, forcing water through holes too small to see and diverting everything else to a waste stream, resulting in water so pure that minerals must be added back

- Why Zach runs two UV stages in his prototypes to handle living contaminants like bacteria and cysts, and how he sees point-of-use filtration following the same decentralization path as building heating

- The case against the printer-ink filter model: Aqueduct Research machines use standard, universally available filter media so owners are never locked into a proprietary replacement cycle

Zach Hamilton is the founder of Aqueduct Research, a company building residential reverse osmosis systems from durable, non-leaching materials. https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachhamilton

Book rec: "Finite and Infinite Games" by James P. Carse (1986). Zach has read it ten times. The distinction between games played to win and games played to keep playing reshapes how you evaluate almost every decision in business and in life.

Also available on:

YouTube: https://youtu.be/fvY6jZDabjc

Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

Between 97 and 99 percent of all humans have measurable levels of PFAS in their blood. Every major watershed on Earth has tested positive, including the Arctic and Antarctica.

Until recently, every technology designed to address that contamination just moved it somewhere else. Alec Ajnsztajn is trying to end that, by destroying the molecules entirely.

As co-founder and CEO of CoFlux Purification, Alec is commercializing a covalent organic framework reactor that captures PFAS and then destroys the carbon-fluoride bonds under UV light, converting the molecules into fluoride and CO2. No concentrated waste. No hazmat landfill. No incineration truck. The contamination is gone.

What we cover:

• Why PFAS compounds are nearly indestructible: carbon-fluoride bonds are among the strongest in organic chemistry, which made them invaluable from Manhattan Project equipment to Teflon cookware to semiconductor photoresists, and also why they accumulate in human tissue indefinitely.
• How every mainstream treatment technology today (granular activated carbon, ion exchange resins) concentrates PFAS rather than eliminating it, and why that concentrated waste still has to be incinerated or injected underground.
• Why CoFlux is starting upstream at contaminated aquifers, AFFF foam change-outs at airports and military bases, and industrial wastewater, rather than at the drinking water tap, where new materials face the highest regulatory bar.
• How the Department of Defense's March 2025 guidance carved out an explicit procurement pathway for novel PFAS destruction technologies, and why that distinction between a paid pilot and a real contract is the difference between runway and revenue.
• Why scaling PFAS capture nationally on granular activated carbon effectively means scaling coal mining, and what it would take for regulations to create on-ramps for destruction technology before the market ratifies incumbents for another generation.
• The physics of a deep-tech startup: CoFlux was built out of Alec's PhD and postdoctoral work at Rice University alongside co-founders Jeremy Daum and Dana, and after roughly two years of materials science development, the company's first field skid is heading to a government site in New Mexico this summer.
  

Alec Ajnsztajn is the co-founder and CEO of CoFlux Purification, an Activate fellow company developing a covalent organic framework reactor that captures and destroys PFAS in contaminated water streams.

He holds a Ph.D. from Rice University, where his work on porous photocatalytic polymers became the scientific foundation for CoFlux.

Connect with Alec on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alec-ajnsztajn-ph-d-a6667564

Book rec:

Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" on how infrastructure gets built, who gets to decide, and what happens when accountability disappears from that process. Alec read it in high school, again in college, and says it still shapes how he thinks about where CoFlux fits into a 30 to 40 year infrastructure transition.

Also available on: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been turning green since the 1920s, and the reason is baked into its original design. The pool stretches roughly a third of a mile, sits one and a half to two and a half feet deep, holds about 6.5 million gallons, and was built on Washington D.C. marshland that has been slowly sinking ever since. Ravi Kurani brought in Terry Arko, Product Training and Content Manager at HASA Pool with over 45 years in the industry, to diagnose what is really going on and whether it can actually be fixed.

What we cover:

• Still water is algae's best friend. The pool was intentionally designed to stay still to function as a mirror, which means strong surface circulation, the intervention that would help most, directly conflicts with the pool's purpose.
• The 1920s design got the basics wrong. Built on unstable marshland with asphalt paving and no meaningful filtration, the ground shifted so badly that engineers later had to drive large timber beams beneath the basin to stop it from sinking. The pool has been leaking roughly 16 million gallons of water per year.
• Nutrients have gotten worse over a century. Phosphates and nitrates in the Potomac watershed are significantly higher today than in the 1920s, driven by population growth, industrialized agriculture, and runoff, giving algae more fuel than it ever had.
• Nanobubbles buy time, not a cure. Nanobubble ozone systems stay neutrally buoyant in the water column for days or weeks, and combined with hydrogen peroxide generate hydroxyl radicals that destroy a wide range of contaminants. Terry is skeptical the technology alone can fully solve the problem given the pool's underlying design constraints.
• Chlorine still has no equal on green algae. After 45 years in the pool industry, Terry has not seen a more effective algaecide than chlorine for green algae. The challenge at the reflecting pool is the cost and logistics of daily liquid chlorine dosing at that scale, plus concerns about chloramine odor in a public monument setting.
• Offline circulation could be the workaround. Terry's proposed fix is to route water through a high-flow filtration loop located off-site, then reintroduce it gently so the surface stays still, preserving the mirror effect while giving the water the turnover and treatment it needs.

Terry Arko is Product Training and Content Manager at HASA Pool, a manufacturer of liquid chlorine, liquid acid, and specialty pool chemicals, with over 45 years of experience across field service, chemical development, and water treatment formulations. Connect with Terry on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/terry-arko-32ab65187

Book rec:

Terry recommends "The Hidden Messages in Water" by Masaru Emoto (2005), which explores how environment and human behavior can affect the very structure of water, bridging the scientific and the personal.

Also available on:

Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, a data center somewhere uses water to cool its servers. Most people have no idea, and neither do the utilities supplying that water. Newsha Ajami, a hydrologist and founding director of Stanford's Governance for Risk, Resilience, Recovery Program (GR3), has spent years tracing water through the hidden seams of the economy, from the electricity charging your phone to the chips powering the AI boom. The U.S. still has no national water strategy, and emerging technologies are arriving faster than the water systems built to serve them.What we cover:- Water's hidden footprint in nearly every product and service, from gas and lithium extraction to electricity generation to data storage- Why the U.S. has no unified federal water mission, and how the Colorado River makes that problem impossible to ignore- The six-pillar national water strategy framework Ajami co-led through the Aspen Institute's National Water Strategy Initiative, two years in the making- How states are welcoming hyperscale data centers for jobs and tax revenue without tying those decisions to water or energy availability, leaving small utilities unprepared- Why standardized water disclosure and a new utility business model, more like a service plan than a metered drip, could unlock the sector the way transparency unlocked startup financeNewsha Ajami is the founding director of the Governance for Risk, Resilience, Recovery Program (GR3) at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability, and a commissioner at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Connect with her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/newsha-ajami-phd/Book rec: Newsha recommended Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (2021), a novel weaving three storylines across radically different eras, including one set aboard a generation ship guided by an AI, as a reminder that imagination remains the one thing no system can replicate.Also available on:Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

A film festival launched because one filmmaker couldn't find a place to submit his short about pharmaceutical pollution in New York City's water supply is now pursuing official UN Water partner status, operating across four continents, and screening PFAS films to law students in Tanzania before they even know they have a PFAS problem.

Robert Strand built the World Water Film Festival from a cold email to a UN groundwater research center in Delft into an organization with over 400 film submissions and events in Wellington, Guangzhou, Rotterdam, London, and Buenos Aires.

The bet is simple: data and white papers stay in people's heads. Film brings water crises into the body. And once it's personal, people move.What Ravi and Robert cover:

• How a cold email to IGRAC, the UN groundwater center in Delft, seeded a partnership that brought Henk Ovink, lead architect of the 2023 UN Water Conference, to deliver opening remarks at the festival's New York launch, and why that single exchange became the organizing model for everything that followed.

• Why film accomplishes what white papers cannot: Ovink's framing that film takes data out of the head and brings it to the heart became the festival's informal mission statement, tested across 90 films in five themed screening spaces at Columbia University's climate school.

• How the festival's global footprint grew almost entirely through relationship chains, from a water journalist in Tanzania opening East Africa, to Water New Zealand hosting in Wellington, to the Dutch Consulate General requesting an event in Guangzhou, to a World Toilet Day screening at Museo Moderno in Buenos Aires.

• Why Robert's team is now working with the Law Society of Tanzania to bring PFAS films to environmental law students, because contamination has already been confirmed in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania while legal frameworks to fund remediation barely exist. The film profiles Amara Strande, a Minnesota woman who lobbied the state to ban non-essential PFAS before dying of cancer. Minnesota passed the law three to five weeks after her death.

• How Robert got his own blood tested at Quest Diagnostics, found himself in the low-to-intermediate PFAS exposure range despite never living near a Superfund site, and what that reveals about bioaccumulation through drinking water, inhalation, and PFAS-treated athletic wear.

• What the gaps in over 400 submissions reveal as a roadmap: water footprints and PFAS in women's personal care products are almost entirely unrepresented on film, and next year's World Water Day theme of gender and water is the opening to fill both.

• The story of Green Warriors, a film following activists who bought enough stock in a polluting company to earn a shareholders meeting seat, stood up when the company announced record profits, and demanded cleanup funding on the spot. That shareholder pressure contributed to France banning PFAS.Robert Strand is the Founder and Executive Director of the World Water Film Festival, a nonprofit that curates films exploring humanity's personal, communal, societal, and environmental relationship with water.worldwaterff.org

Also available on:Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/