Gladium

Gladium is, in practice, one experienced operator's personal investment and advisory vehicle rather than a fund with outside backers. Jan Svärd spent decades inside heavy chemistry, including a stretch as president of AkzoNobel Functional Chemicals, before setting up Gladium in Gothenburg in 2015. He built it around his own operating judgement, not a pool of limited partners (the outside investors who normally bankroll a fund).

Gladium splits its work three ways: hands-on advisory consulting, direct investment, and Lean improvement programmes, all aimed at the process industry, the plants that turn raw chemistry into materials, energy and clean water. That operator-not-financier origin shapes how Svärd invests, taking board seats and staying close to the engineering rather than scattering small cheques across a long portfolio.

Gladium's water exposure is deliberately narrow. The single water company on my Leviathan radar is Atium, a Chalmers University spin-out in Gothenburg whose reusable electrochemical filter pulls toxic metals such as mercury out of water. Svärd sits on Atium's board, and Gladium invested next to Chalmers Ventures, Stena and Butterfly Ventures, the close, regional, deep-tech company it tends to keep.

Gladium is, in the end, a process-industry insider's vehicle that touches water only where the chemistry and the geography line up, which is why (don't) Waste Water rates its water commitment Occasional: 1 water company across 2 deals, the most recent in 2024. For a newcomer, the read is simple: Gladium turns up when water is really an industrial-process problem, with someone who has actually run the plants in the room.