Pentair

Pentair started life in 1966 as a balloon company. Five engineers and salesmen in Minnesota pooled their money to build high-altitude research balloons and stitched the name together from the Greek penta, for the five of them, and air, for the product. The balloons flopped inside two years; what survived was a knack for buying small industrial businesses and fixing them, and six decades later that instinct points almost entirely at water. Pentair is now an S&P 500 company built around moving, treating and enjoying water, from the pump in a basement to the membranes in a desalination plant.

Pentair is a strategic investor, which is a different animal from a venture fund. A venture capital, or VC, fund raises money from outside backers and exists to write cheques; Pentair invests off its own balance sheet, and its first instinct is to acquire a business outright rather than take a minority slice. The logic is the channel: a young company that plugs into Pentair gains a route to the dealers, pool builders, utilities and retail shelves that a four-billion-dollar water company already owns. In 2025 it announced a deal to buy Hydra-Stop, whose valves let a city repair one broken section of a water main without shutting the whole street down, a tidy illustration of the playbook.

Pentair the investor shows up where a young company makes its core water business smarter. It backed Aqua Membranes, whose 3D-printed spacers make the spiral-wound membranes inside reverse-osmosis systems work harder, and HOPE Hydration, which puts connected public water stations on city streets to cut single-use plastic. The thread is water Pentair already understands, filtration, treatment and access, not a scattershot climate portfolio. It writes these cheques alongside specialists like the water-only fund Burnt Island Ventures, so a founder gets Pentair's scale next to a dedicated water investor's focus.

Pentair runs its strategy and investing through its senior team rather than a branded venture arm: Adrian Chiu, the Chief Strategy, Innovation and Digital Officer, owns the innovation and digital agenda, while corporate development and capital sit with new CFO Nick Brazis, who ran Pentair's deal-making before taking the finance seat in March 2026, all under CEO John Stauch. For a water-tech founder, the read is simple: Pentair is not a fund you pitch for a quick cheque, it is a strategic backer worth knowing if your technology belongs inside the world of pumps, filters and treatment it already sells.