Ashwin Madgavkar

Ashwin Madgavkar is the Founder and CEO of Ceres Imaging. He grew up in Texas and early in his career worked as an electrical engineer and strategy consultant, primarily in the energy industry.

In 2012, while working for a leading Brazilian sugarcane ethanol producer, Ash saw that large-scale agriculture operations often still make blanket decisions in areas like fertilizer and pesticide use, leading to waste, productivity losses, and environmental damage. In surveying an agribusiness opportunity in Colombia, he saw further evidence of a need in the industry for advanced data sources.

A solution to those problems began to take shape for Madgavkar in his time at Stanford, where he earned an MBA and took earth sciences classes that related to his engineering interests.

He learned about phenomenal advances in spectral imaging that Stanford researchers were applying to study Amazonian tree species and microclimates.  Why couldn’t that advanced technology be applied to help farmers improve their yields, while saving water in drought-prone areas like California?

Madgavkar founded Ceres in 2013 and recruited a talented core team of scientists to develop the hardware, software, and know-how that has made the company fast-growing and well-loved by customers.

Greg Newbloom

Greg Newbloom believes that if sustainability was simple, cheap & low-risk – it would be irresistible. Greg states that”Multi-dimensional innovation across technology, services, policy & business models is the path to frictionless & broad adoption of sustainable best practices, but even so we’re not moving fast enough to correct the past.” That’s why Greg is passionate about accelerating innovation towards irresistible sustainability.

Mr. Newbloom’s background blends technology development (10+ years), entrepreneurship (10+ years) and management (7+ years) with an emphasis on bringing together counter-intuitive innovations to deliver extraordinary value (financial & sustainable). He is an action-oriented believer in building diverse teams, fostering a people-first culture, and enhancing idea meritocracy. Greg’s efforts have been recognized with numerous awards including prestigious alumni awards from both his alma maters, professional society early career recognition, and national/regional innovator awards.

Most recently, Greg had the privilege of building Membrion – a company focused on recovering water from “impossible” waste sources. In 6 short years, he founded the company, raised >$10M & built a diverse 20+ person team that invented, scaled & commercialized a world-changing technology. Learn more about Membrion here: Membrion.com

Matt Hurley

Matt Hurley is the GM at McMullin Area Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Hurley leads MAGSA in the development, adoption, and implementation of a Groundwater Sustainability Plan for the sustainable management of groundwater within the MAGSA service area.

As CEO of Water Management Professionals, Inc, Hurley has extensive SGMA knowledge and background having been heavily involved at the State and local levels with the development of the regulations and implementation of SGMA. He served on the Department of Water Resources SGMA Practitioner’s Advisory Panel and the Association of California Water Agencies SGMA Task Force. “I am grateful to the Board for putting their trust in me as the new general manager of MAGSA. I will bring all the energy and expertise I have to implement SGMA for the best possible outcome for the landowners and communities served by MAGSA,” stated Hurley.

As a licensed attorney, Hurley is fully versed in water law, especially groundwater, in the State of California along with having broad experience in water resource and special district management. In addition to his role as General Manager of Angiola Water District, Deer Creek Storm Water District, and Green Valley Water District for the last ten years, Hurley organized and managed the Tri-County Water Authority GSA in the Tulare Lake Subbasin since 2016. He also served as Board Chair for several local water agencies including the Fresno Slough Water District, Atwell Island Water District, and the Tri-County Water Authority GSA. “Groundwater availability is essential for businesses, farms, and residents to thrive in the McMullin Area. Hurley has the experience and knowledge to navigate MAGSA through the challenges of implementing the State’s new groundwater regulations while minimizing the impacts to our local economy,” stated MAGSA Board Chair Don Cameron.

Sol Rosenbaum

Sol Rosenbaum is a Licensed PE with 19+ years in the energy engineering world. He is the Founder of http://www.TheEngineeringMentor.com with a passion for mentoring younger engineers.
He is a mechanical/energy engineer who enjoys helping building owners with financially viable energy savings projects. In Sol’s early positions, he worked on large ESPC projects where his tasks included climbing through mechanical rooms & calculating/designing the systems, construction/project management, and through the M & V phase. Since then, he has moved towards the management side of things, but still maintains a strong foothold on the technical side by providing oversight and general guidance to the engineering team. Currently, as Director, Green & Energy Services, he is involved in both technical work overseeing & guiding the engineering team as well as business & marketing to increase the revenue stream from this department. My firm, GRS Group provides due diligence transactional services related to the mortgage finance/CRE world.

Sol believes in helping out the next generation of engineers. Please check out his work and services here: www.TheEngineeringMentor.com

Jon McClean

Dr. Jon McClean has worked in the field of water treatment since 1986. He is recognized as an expert in the field of Ultra Violet disinfection and has a particular interest in Advanced Oxidation Processes. He won the Queen’s Award in 2001 for innovation in UV light that now forms an integral part of state-of-the-art AOP systems and has been awarded several patents. He sold his business in 2016, which is now part of Evoqua Water Technologies. Dr. McClean currently has responsibility for technology and innovation across Evoqua Water Technologies. Evoqua is a $1.5B provider of water and wastewater solutions that Transform Water and Enrich Lives.

Dr. McClean received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Imperial College, London and his MBA from Henley Management College and Instead, Paris. He received his Doctoral Degree from Xavier University, Cincinnati. His Ph.D Dissertation subject was the moderating effect that self-awareness has on the relationship between personality and Transformational Leadership.

Xylem Inc., a leading global water technology company, and Evoqua, a leader in mission-critical water treatment solutions and services, announced in January 2023 that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Xylem will acquire Evoqua in an all-stock transaction that reflects an implied enterprise value of approximately $7.5 billion.

Congratulations to Jon and his team on the acquisition.

George Demosthenous 

George Demosthenous is the CEO of VODA.ai – an award-winning, software company, powered by artificial intelligence and focused on risk modeling. George co-founded VODA.ai in 2017 to help utilities leverage their data to assess risk and make infrastructure decisions quicker and with improved accuracy. Prior to VODA.ai, George worked at a public company, helping utilities manage their assets and lower NRW.

How was VODA.ai founded?

George Demosthenous worked in the water industry for years, and often heard his utility friends complain by the amount of pipe failures they had to deal with. They shared their frustration over bad press and felt that planning was time-consuming and complicated.

While George was working on a master’s degree at Harvard, he took an innovation course from Jim Fitchett. Jim had previously run a company that used advanced technology to predict the health of people. They found patterns that led to health events and then applied those patterns to groups of people, predicting the likelihood of diabetic complications, cardiac episodes, and other avoidable events.

Over coffee one day, George told Jim about the problem of poor health of water pipes. A lightbulb went off in Jim’s head. If the health of people could be predicted, why not water pipe health as well? Soon after, they founded VODA.ai to help water professionals plan more effectively, easier, and faster – way faster.

To learn more about VODA, please visit https://voda.ai/.

Greg Quist and David Drake

Greg Quist is one of the original inventors and co-founder of SmartCover. He served as President & CEO of SmartCover since founding for over 16 years. A long-time member of the water community, Greg was elected to the Rincon del Diablo Municipal Water District Board of Directors in 1990, where he has served for the past 32 years in various roles including President, Vice President, and Treasurer. Rincon’s Board appointed Greg to the San Diego County Water Authority Board in 1996 for 12 years where he led a coalition of eleven agencies to achieve more than $1M per year in water delivery savings. With a background in the areas of metamaterials, numerical analysis, signal processing, pattern recognition, wireless communications, and system integration, Greg has worked as a technologist, manager and executive at Alcoa, McDonnell-Douglas, and SAIC and has founded and successfully spun off several high technology start-up companies, primarily in real-time detection and water technology. He holds 17 patents with several pending. Greg earned his undergraduate degree in astrophysics with a minor in economics from Yale College where he played football and baseball. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has held top-level government clearances and is Chairman Emeritus of the Urban Water Institute.

David Drake has served in engineering and management roles since 1974. He was a Member of the Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Manager of Engineering at Oak Industries, Software Unit Manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, CIO and VP at Mitchell International, Internet Service Architect at SAIC, and Co-founder and Enterprise Architect of SmartCover Systems in Escondido, CA. He holds 14 US and five foreign patents. He won a First Place Design Award from the Electrical Engineering Times. He is active in the AWWA, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a past Chair of the Escondido Planning Commission and served as the City of Escondido’s representative to the San Diego County Water Authority, where he was a member of the Administrative/Finance and Engineering committees. He graduated from Caltech in Electrical Engineering and is a Life Member of the Caltech Alumni Association. In 2017 he was named  a Life Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and was awarded his Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from USC. In 2020, he was named as the Industry Icon of Water and Wastes Digest.

To learn more about Smart Cover, please visit https://smartcoversystems.com/

Adam Tank

Colleagues have described Adam as their “trusted ‘go-to” when they need a leader to step into complex situations, rapidly identify the moving parts, develop sound business strategies, and execute to completion.

Adam has developed skill sets in negotiations, open innovation, financing, and P&L management over a 10+ year career in Fortune 100 companies, international small businesses, and venture capital-backed technology start-ups.

Some of Adam’s challenging but fulfilling accomplishments have been:

• Leading the Digital Water division at General Electric, developing new IoT products and services for water utilities in addition to spearheading their venture capital efforts
• Graduating from GE’s Experienced Commercial Leadership Program (ECLP)
• Founding a venture capital-backed startup developing breakthrough robotic technologies, acquired less than three years later by a publicly traded company.
• Living in Brazil as an expatriate and developing innovative strategies to grow a small CPG business

One constant in Adam’s career has been teamwork – that success simply is not possible without the cooperation of multiple stakeholders. He is fully dedicated to leading teams of individuals to success – enabling them and getting out of their way. He most recently built a team of talented engineers developing robotic technology to save our water infrastructure. Adam is also passionate about non-profit work and volunteers as a mentor with Defy Ventures – a non-profit aiming to end mass incarceration through entrepreneurial and life-skills coaching for currently and formerly incarcerated men and women.

If you’d like to learn more about Adam and his work and connect, please visit his personal website: www.adamtank.com

Austin Meyermann

Austin Meyermann is the founder and current President of Hunter Crown, LLC a consultative, boutique executive search firm dedicated to placing top talent with world-class companies. Clients include portfolio companies of Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, XPV Capital, Element Partners, SAIL Capital, and True North Venture Partners.

Austin is also the CEO of TalentCMO, LLC. TalentCMO is HR’s recruitment marketing partner and its mission is to develop and deliver a continuous pipeline of top talent to clients through the application of process-driven technical marketing strategies. We help our clients to tell their stories through the development and projection of the employer brand. We drive engagement through social, content, and email marketing. Importantly, we cultivate and engage with talent communities pre-demand, because on-demand is already too late in the talent market of today.

To learn more about Hunter Crown and its services, please visit https://www.huntercrown.com/

David Solomon

David Solomon – Founder & CTO of Aquarius Spectrum

David Solomon is a Serial Entrepreneur and technology leader in the field of Big Data analysis, IOT, Machine Learning, signal processing, and acoustics. David has over 25 years of experience in research and development in the military, medical and water industries. Formerly founder and CEO of EndoRhythm ltd and COO of WideMed ltd. David holds a BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technion-Haifa. https://www.linkedin.com/in/david1solomon/

Aquarius Spectrum provides acoustic solutions that enable water utilities to proactively monitor their distribution pipe network, solve infrastructure issues, detect background leaks, reduce NRW and operational costs and assess the pipes’ condition. These solutions combine sensitive sensors powered by sophisticated algorithms, big data analysis, and advanced connectivity (CAT-M/NB-IoT). By using our most innovative water network monitoring platform that enables accurate pinpointing of leaks and identification of poor pipe sections for renewal – water utilities improve the resiliency of their new and aging water network infrastructure. To learn more, please visit: https://aqs-systems.com/